This essay examines Secularism as developed by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851–1852. While historians have noted the importance of evolutionary thought for freethinking radicals from the 1840s, and others have traced the popularization of agnosticism and Darwinian evolution by later Victorian freethinkers, insufficient attention has been paid to mid-century Secularism as constitutive of the cultural and intellectual environment necessary for the promotion and relative success of scientific naturalism. I argue that Secularism was a significant source for the emerging new creed of scientific naturalism in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only did early Secularism help clear the way by fighting battles with the state and religious interlocutors, but it also served as a source for what Huxley, almost twenty years later, termed ‘agnosticism’. Published in The British Journal for the History of Science. 46(2): 231–254, June 2013. Click here or on title.
Secularism is an orientation to life that places paramount importance on the matters of ‘this world’, and considers observation and reason the best means by which the things of this world can be known and improved. It has its roots in a response to religious belief, but is not necessarily a form of religion in itself . In some forms, secularism has been preoccupied only with the elimination of religious belief; in others, it is concerned with substituting a secular creed in its place. Published in Harris, Margaret, editor. George Eliot in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 271-278. Click here or on title.
In this paper we critically evaluate an argument put forward by William Lane Craig for the existence of God based on the assumption that if there were no God, there could be no objective morality. Contrary to Craig, we show that there are some necessary moral truths and objective moral reasoning that holds up whether there is a God or not. We go on to argue that religious faith, when taken alone and without reason or evidence, actually risks undermining morality and is an unreliable source of moral truths. We recommend a viewpoint on morality that is based on reason and public consensus, that is compatible with science, and that cuts across the range of religious and non-religious positions. Published in the International Philosophical Quarterly. 51.3. 203 (September 2011): 331-38. Click here or on title.
Review of Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition. Patricia Donahue and Gretchen Flesher Moon, editors. A new anthology from the University of Pittsburgh Press Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture will be of interest to historians of American com position pedagogy and practice. Local Histories locates the archives of composition-rhetoric from the 1840s to the late 1960s in liberal arts colleges, normal schools, the junior college movement, and Lincoln University, the first of the so-called Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). Published in College Composition and Communication. Vol. 60, No. 2 (December 2008), pp. w53-w57. Click here or on title.
Despite his unique contribution to evolutionary theory, the mechanism of natural selection, Charles Darwin can hardly be considered the first evolutionary theorist in history. It is generally acknowledged that organic evolution, or ’transmutation’ as it was called during his lifetime, was hardly a new idea when Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 … In fact, Darwin not only followed closely behind other transmutation theorists, but his own views met with a degree of skepticism not altogether unlike that which greeted his predecessors. As James Secord notes, the scientific consensus regarding natural selection “is a twentieth-century creation” and the “centrality given to Darwin” is also a recent phenomenon (Intro. to Vestiges x). As historians of science have begun to dismantle the ’all-roads-lead-to-Darwin’ consensus (Secord, Intro. to Vestiges x) by exploring its social, cultural and even ideological contingencies, an exploration of the evolutionary roads not taken promises to be an important and illuminating venture. Published on The Victorian Web. December 2008. Click here or on title.
The fictionalizing of science happens to be a meta-theme in Middlemarch, and one which, I argue, George Eliot sets out consciously and masterfully to interrogate. In the process, I hope to show that Eliot's use of science is far from naive or merely syncretic. To the contrary, I argue that in Middlemarch Eliot actually anticipates a greater discursive shift in scientific theory of which Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (l962) is the watermark in the philosophy of science, and which Michel Foucault marks and notes in his various archaeologies of knowledge. (Originally published on The Victorian Web. December 2008. Click here or on title.
As recent scholarship on the history of invention has shown, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inventor was proposed as a plausible new hero of the industrial revolution. But the inventor has also been characterized as a creature of accident—of risk, poverty, madness, and premature death. By the 1820s, inventors were not only heroes of industry; they became its victims as well—“poor inventors” who suffered under poverty and oppression to bring forth the works of the mind. The case of the poor inventor was introduced and championed by advocates of inventive workers from the 1820s until the 1840s; the figure came to stand emblematically for working-class interests at large. By 1850, however, the ideological and rhetorical construct of the poor inventor was appropriated by a liberal, mostly middle-class lobby to affect the first reform of patent law in modern British history. Click here or on title.
This dissertation examines what I call the “publics of science,” from early to mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It is an account of new and emerging sites for the production, dissemination, and appropriation of knowledge amongst various participants—authors, publishers, editors, reviewers, critics, readers, and others—as they vied for (and against) cultural authority on the basis of beliefs claimed as “scientific.” Drawing on theoretical frameworks from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), actor-network theory, periodical studies, the history of the book—and operating under the broad tent of cultural studies—I introduce to the cultural history of science the kind of revisionism that has been directed at the Habermasian “public sphere” in cultural history and critical theory. I argue that during the period that I consider—roughly 1820 to 1860—the landscape of science in culture should be revised to account for multiple, distinct, yet overlapping publics of science. In the first two chapters, I consider how a scientific culture spread vis-à-vis radical science, gentlemanly education reform, and the new “useful knowledge” industry that they helped to spawn. In the following two chapters, I apply the methods of book history to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33). First, I examine the context of production—the gentlemanly knowledge project initiated by Charles Lyell and the aims of the Murray publishing house. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, I then examine the early periodical reception of volume one to see how reviewers from various publics helped to shape the meaning of the text for their readers. In chapter five, I trace the development of Secularism from 1840s artisan freethought, showing that Secularism advanced a methodological materialism and a morality based on materialist principles, well in advance of the new naturalism or scientific agnosticism. In the conclusion, I consider causes for the “disappearance” of such subaltern or alternative science publics as radical science, the Mechanics’ Institutes, and Secularism, from the history and historiography of science, suggesting how cultural studies of discourse can aid in their recuperation and point to possibilities for contemporary interventions in science and technology. Click here or on title.
As Thomas Carlyle quipped in 1829 in “Signs of the Times,” in the nineteenth century, “every little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine;-- hanging out, like its windmill, into the popularis aura, to grind meal for the society.” In my dissertation, “The Publics of Science: Periodicals and the Making of British Science, 1820-1860,” I have endeavored to study the “machinery” for the production and dissemination of science in culture—to examine how various sects or publics provided scientific “meal for the society.” Examining several periodicals from early to mid-nineteenth-century Britain, my dissertation is an account of emerging sites for the production, dissemination, negotiation, and appropriation of knowledge amongst various participants—authors, publishers, editors, reviewers, critics, readers and others—as they vied for (and against) cultural authority on the basis of beliefs claimed as “scientific.”
In order to account for a shift from catastrophism to gradualism, I argue that science and literature must be referred to underlying discursive pressures mediating between cultural spheres. Rather than considering literature as appropriating the idioms of science, and/or vice versa, the social and political significations of competing epistemologies and philosophical positions within and across cultural spheres should be traced to account for changes within cultural representation. Click here or on title.
One way to understand the diverse discourse known as science studies is to consider the ways in which different camps and theorists think (or do not think) the question of history, and to consider how historical theories and methods connect with epistemologies and the possibilities for critical discourse regarding science. Can the question of historical method or theory serve as a useful guide to the discourse, perhaps even a better index for considering the issue of critical engagement, than epistemological conviction (or lack thereof)? I will explore the issue by considering the historical methods and theories of history of several interlocutors located within the discourse of science studies, in order to illustrate the possibilities for this approach. As the discussion should make clear, the historical approach is productive of comparative reading of interlocutors in terms of the possibilities for a critical discursive relationship to their objects of knowledge, as well as for demonstrating the relationship between historical method and theory, and epistemology. Click here or on title.
I wrote the following essay (“From ‘Material and Philosophick Necessity’ to ‘Intellectual Physicks’”) several years ago, as an inaugural entry into a new approach to outmode both “interdisciplinary” and “multi-disciplinary” studies. I call the approach "Historical Inter-Field Studies." Click here or on title.
