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Charles Cashdollar reinterprets nineteenth-century British and American Protestant thought by identifying positivism as the central intellectual issue of the era. Positivism meant, at first, the ideas of the French thinker Auguste Comte; later in the century, the term indicated a more general opposition to supernatural religion. Cashdollar shows that contemporary thinkers recognized positivism, at each of these stages, as the most fundamental of the proliferating challenges to religious belief. He further reveals how the encounter with positivism altered Protestant orthodoxy--in both subtle and radical ways. Positivists denied that humans could know anything other than physical phenomena. De...
This book sets out to shed light on what is specific to American Transcendentalism by comparing it with the atheistic vision of German philosophers and theologians like Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer. The study argues that atheism was part of the discursive and religious context from which Transcendentalism emerged. Tendencies toward atheism were already inherent in Transcendentalist thought. The atheist scenario came to the surface in the controversy about Emerson’s “new views.” Contemporary critics charged that the deity Emerson worshipped was himself. Emersonian Transcendentalism thus anticipated some of the central concerns in the works of German atheists like Feuerbach. From idealism to atheism seemed but a short step.
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