Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin

"Wild Experiment argues that feeling and thinking are not separate. Drawing on a range of fields including science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and the post-critical turn in literary studies, it reconceptualizes thinking as not just connected to feeling, but defined by it. This has implications for how we understand domains often imagined to be beyond emotion, including science, secularism, and atheism. The first part of the book builds an interdisciplinary background for what Donovan O. Schaefer calls "cogency theory"-studies of how thinking is determined by feeling. The second part turns to the history of the reception of evolutionary biology to explore three case studies of scientific secularism. Reconsidering the early Darwinian controversies, the Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s, part two argues that we can't understand scientific secularism without mapping how it feels. The epilogue considers how relationships between emotion, science, and secularism shape contemporary climate denialism"--
In Wild Experiment, 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 New Atheist movement of the 2000s. Along the way, Schaefer reappraises a range of related issues, from secular architecture at Oxford to American eugenics to contemporary climate denialism. These case studies locate the intersection of thinking and feeling in the way scientific rationality balances excited discovery with anxious scrutiny, in the fascination of conspiracy theories, and in how racist feelings assume the mantle of rational objectivity. The fact that cognition is felt, Schaefer demonstrates, is both why science succeeds and why it fails. He concludes that science, secularism, atheism, and reason itself are not separate from feeling but comprehensively defined by it.
Examining the reception of evolutionary biology, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s, Donovan O. Schaefer theorizes the relationship between thinking and feeling by challenging the conventional wisdom that they are separate.