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
It’s a great pleasure to announce Forbidden Histories supporter Jules Evans as the winner of the last Patreon prize draw. Jules, who won a copy of Adam Crabtree’s seminal From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing, is currently a research fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen … 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
From its inception in 2013, Forbidden Histories has been a labour of love – I currently receive no funding for my research and pay all expenses to run this website, produce Youtube videos, and promote FH out of my own pocket. (Sadly, ad revenue and Amazon and AbeBooks affiliate commissions do not even begin to … 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
The first prize draw for patrons of Forbidden Histories has come to a close, and I am very pleased to announce Ian Thompson in California as the winner. Ian, a nuclear physicist who has also published in the philosophy of science, has kindly permitted me to name him as the recipient of the prize. I’m … Read more
It’s no secret that universities are more and more organized like corporations these days, and that funding for research is increasingly invested into applied sciences and fields with obvious potential to generate profit. As a result, historians and other humanities scholars even with stellar academic track records are forced to be inventive as jobs are getting … 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