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
After the first Patreon prize draw in February, I was excited to announce the winner, Dr. Ian J. Thompson, a theoretical physicist who also happens to hold rather heretical views on the relationship between science and ‘magic’. After all, one central theme of Forbidden Histories is the problem of continuity: Contrary to popular notions according … 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
I’m excited to announce that the long-awaited book by Richard Noakes is now available for pre-order. Scheduled to appear in October 2019 as part of the Science in History series by Cambridge University Press, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain will provide surprising insights into the heterodox preoccupations of many … Read more
Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris is a bestselling author and medical historian with a doctorate from the University of Oxford. Her debut book, The Butchering Art, won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Literary Science in the United States; and was shortlisted for both the Wellcome Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize in the United Kingdom. Dr. … Read more
In case you haven’t noticed, American and British politics are in utter shambles. A climate science-denying President of the supposedly United States gets away with racial slurs and refusals to renounce sympathies with Neo-Nazis, and while I don’t think it’s fair to say that everybody who voted for Brexit is a racist, correlations between racial … 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