Author Meets Critics: Peter Harrison’s Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age

The panel will offer critical assessments of Peter Harrison’s Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (Cambridge, 2024) with a response by the author. Harrison’s book traces the historical emergence of scientific naturalism, showing how this approach initially developed from religious considerations. One major focus is the natural/supernatural dichotomy which appears only in the late Middle Ages and subsequently developed into a distinctive feature of scientific thinking about the world. The discussion will canvas a number of issues raised by the book: the present status of scientific naturalism; the implications of its contingent origins; whether naturalism is essential to scientific practice; how we might assess alternative approaches to the natural world, characteristic of both the pre-modern West and non-Western cultures, that are not premised on a natural/supernatural dichotomy; and, more generally, the plausibility and significance of large scale modernity narratives.