Donovan O. Schaefer, "Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin" (Duke UP, 2022)

New Books in Sociology · Jan 2, 2023 · 1h 12m

In Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke UP, 2022), Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the conventional wisdom that feeling and thinking are separate. Drawing on science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and contemporary literary criticism, Schaefer reconceptualizes rationality as defined by affective processes at every level. He introduces the model of "cogency theory" to reconsider the relationship between evolutionary biology and secularism, examining mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian controversies, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the…