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Full-Text Articles in Intellectual History

Scientism, Satire, And Sacrificial Ceremony In Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" And C.S. Lewis's "That Hideous Strength", Jonathan Smalt May 2014

Scientism, Satire, And Sacrificial Ceremony In Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" And C.S. Lewis's "That Hideous Strength", Jonathan Smalt

Masters Theses

Though the nineteenth-century Victorian belief that science alone could provide utopia for man weakened in the epistemological uncertainty of the postmodern era, this belief still continues today. In order to understand our current scientific milieu--and the dangers of propagating scientism--we must first trace the rise of scientism in the nineteenth-century. Though removed, Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Notes From Underground (1864), and C.S. Lewis, in That Hideous Strength (1965), are united in their critiques of scientism as a conceptual framework for human residency. For Dostoevsky, the Crystal Palace of London's Great Exhibition (1862) embodied the nineteenth-century goal to found utopia through the …


Old Gods In New Clothes: The French Revolutionary Cults And The "Rebirth Of The Golden Age", Jennifer Boyet May 2014

Old Gods In New Clothes: The French Revolutionary Cults And The "Rebirth Of The Golden Age", Jennifer Boyet

Masters Theses

The French Revolution's state cults were possible because of French intellectuals' preference for pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilization, as well as France's history of heterodoxy. The philosophes endorsed ancient Greco-Roman civilization as embodying mankind's ideal and more "natural" state; French revolutionary leaders avidly read these ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers. This Enlightenment Classicalism influenced the designers of the French state religions to mirror Greco-Roman paganism in the new regime's festivals and iconography. The French people's fascination with the Occult further created the cultural and intellectual climate for the creation and acceptance of these new religions of the dechristianized republic. Under this worldview, …