Members-only oddcast episode
On est enchanté encore avec Jason Josephson Storm
This is a special oddcast episode for SHWEP members only
Already a member? Log in here to view this episode
In an extended interview with Jason Storm, we discuss the question of scientific knowledge and its truth-claims as opposed to the claims of other ways of knowing (such as ‘magic’), the ‘wastebasket category’ model of western esotericism and the survival of the magical in modernity, the ways in which we can legitimately speak of advances in human knowledge without falling for whiggish narratives that don’t match the facts on the ground, a digression to Japan as the Edo period gives way to the Meiji, and finally a discussion of whether ‘magic’ might be a better master-category than ‘science’ for the technological wonders which shape our lives today.
Interview Bio:
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is a historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He is currently Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. Storm received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, his MA from Harvard University, and has held visiting positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, and Universität Leipzig in Germany. He is the author of award-winning The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), as well as Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), all published by University of Chicago Press.
Works Cited in this Episode:
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso Editions, London, 1979.
Nicolaus Copernicus. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Iohannes Petreius, Nürnberg, 1543.
Paul Feyerabend. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. New Left Books, London, 1975.
Michel Foucault. What is Enlightenment? In Paul Rabinow, editor, The Foucault Reader, pages 32–50. Pantheon Books, New York, NY, 1984.
Heinrich Kramer. Malleus maleficarum, maleficas & earum hæresim, ut phramea potentissima conteres. 1487.
Thomas S. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1962.
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm. Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021.
David Banner
April 17, 2023
The placebo effect is very complex and it relates to belief systems, of course. Magic is a category that we now believe to be true/not true, depending on belief. And Thomas Kuhn’s breakthrough shows how old paradigms fall away when evidence is too compelling to hang onto the old paradigm. So, maybe consensual reality is just an agreement about what is real.