Agenda: New book by Wouter Hanegraaff
'Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture'.
Academics have little with 'esoteric', 'occult, 'magical' or 'irrational' ideas, but are seldom aware of the historical tradition to which these terms refer. In his new book, 'Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture', Wouter Hanegraaff (UvA), describes the forgotten history of how intellectuals since the Renaissance to date have dealt with a complexity of 'pagan' ideas through which the foundations of biblical Christianity and Greek rationality were called into question. Against the backdrop of fierce polemics these Protestant traditions were placed outside the academic discours since the Enlightment. Since then these were "the opposite of science" and an area that needed to be more seriously considered. The result was a profound ignorance among academics about the historical foundations of their own intellectual identity, and a basic one-sided form of historiography in the fields of religion, philosphy and science - and their mutual interdependence.
Three scientist will debate this evening on Hanegraaff's assertion that within the humanities there is a serious knowlegde gap with respect to key aspects of Western Culture that underlie infectious terms such as "Western Esotericism" or "the occult".
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