“You don’t want to mess with Mrs. Sidgwick!”. No Victorian has ever written a statement like this, though it is certainly along the lines of what many contemporaries of Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick were thinking. Born on 11 March 1845 into one of the most politically and intellectually influential families in Britain, Nora (as she was … Read more
Christian Jarrett, an editor at Aeon magazine, approached me after reading my response to a Japanese newspaper query on ghost beliefs in the West last year to commission a short article on a similar topic. I was happy to comply, and my Aeon piece on the hidden history of hallucinations and visions went online in … Read more
The latest issue of Aries, the prime academic journal for the study of Western esotericism, includes a comprehensive assessment of Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters by Eva Kingsepp at Karlstad University, Sweden. Whereas the first part of my own review here on Forbidden Histories was concerned with Kurlander’s evidence-free depiction of ‘mainstream’ science’s relationship with parapsychology … Read more
I’m very happy to announce our colleague Kyle Falcon in Canada as the winner of the latest Patreon prize draw. As it happens, Kyle, who has won a copy of Alison Winter’s classical study Mesmerized, is a fellow historian working on themes closely related to those covered on Forbidden Histories: His Ph.D. research at Wilfrid … Read more
In keeping with mesmerism and hypnotism as the themes of the last prize (a copy of Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud), I selected Alison Winter’s seminal study Mesmerized. Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain for the next draw. Published in 1998 by University of Chicago Press, Winter’s meticulously researched study continues to set the … Read more
If you saw the call for papers and extended abstract of my presentation, you can imagine how much I was looking forward to last week’s conference on the history of science and spiritualism at Leeds Trinity University. In fact, the last time I was so excited about a conference was in 2013, when I organized … Read more
As I’m preparing my presentation for the upcoming conference on the history of science and spiritualism in Leeds, I thought I’d share an extended version of my abstract with those of you who won’t be able to attend: Scientific Naturalism and the Study of Spiritualist Phenomena by Positivist and Materialist Representatives of Science and Medicine … Read more
[This article continues my earlier post, “Materialism vs. Supernaturalism? ‘Scientific Naturalism’ in Context”]. Is the popular conflation of scientific naturalism with ontological materialism historically legit? Our first look at the context of Thomas H. Huxley’s first usage of ‘scientific naturalism’ in the sense in which it is deployed today suggested that it is not: Yes, … Read more
An effective way to flag up fundamental difficulties with the often taken-for-granted notion that science has disenchanted the world is to demonstrate that several ‘founding fathers’ of science entertained rather strong interests in the occult. Standard histories of psychology feature William James at Harvard and Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig as founders of the modern psychological … Read more
In 2014 I was invited to give a talk at the University of Basel as part of a public lecture series on ‘transcendent experiences’, which was organized by the biologist and philosopher Heiner Schwenke. German readers might be interested in a text of mine which is based on this lecture, and which just appeared in … Read more