Login

Publications  •  Project Statistics

Glossary  •  Schools  •  Disciplines
People Search: 
   
Title/Abstract Search: 

Dissertation Information for Courtenay Grean Raia

NAME:
- Courtenay Grean Raia

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2005)

ADVISORS:
- Theodore M. Porter

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- M. Norton Wise
- Ali Behdad

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: The substance of things hoped for: Faith, science and psychical research in the Victorian Fin de Siecle

Abstract: My dissertation explores the philosophical and practical connections between late-nineteenth century psychical research and the sciences. I ask how historically determined notions of the unexplained, the unknown, and the supernatural unsettled the boundaries of belief in both theological and empirical discourses, seeding modern thought with new epistemological possibilities and paradigms for human identity. The three major sections of my project are organized biographically around abnormal psychologist Frederic Myers, cultural anthropologist Andrew Lang, and radiation physicist Oliver Lodge in order to embed their intellectual production within the deeper historical structures of personality. Using the unusually rich archival sources available on my subjects, I explore the link between their coming of age in the 1860's and their attraction to psychical research in the 1880's and 1890's, demonstrating how the curious logic of psychical research, a program dedicated to finding physical proof of metaphysical phenomena, evolved out of mid-Victorian epistemological, religious, and psychological tensions.

Although my main interest lies with the ideological uses made of psychical research, certainly the nuts and bolts of its scientific practice are of material interest to my project as well; what they do is critically important to understanding what they think. The disciplinary focus of this work shows that, despite strong elements of nostalgia, psychical research was equally a forward-looking philosophy, using the language of modern physics, psychology and anthropology to create a vibrantly contemporary discourse with an extensive elite, popular and academic reach. In an effort to rescue the humanistic potential of science from the perceived anti-humanistic threat of its materialist epistemology, these men used psychical research to propose alternative models of matter (Lodge), mind (Myers) and man (Lang), effectively arguing idealism back into the sciences. Rather than retiring these thinkers as historically marginal disciplinary heretics, my dissertation argues that Lang, Lodge and Myers were major players in a central Victorian heterodoxy. They sought to remain within the idiom of contemporary science even while attempting to theorize the forbidden metaphysical, and even theological, implications of their research - a fascinating paradox that my thesis attempts to unpack.

MPACT Scores for Courtenay Grean Raia

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-10 16:03:03

Advisors and Advisees Graph

generating graph, please reload

Students under Courtenay Grean Raia

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None