At long last, I just uploaded the second part of “Poltergeist Phenomena and the History of Science” to our Youtube channel. After part one was concerned with early modern responses to “things that go bump in the night” by Robert Boyle and colleagues at the Royal Society, and looked at the decline of empirical approaches … Read more
“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
In my last article on William James’ heretical science I mentioned that among the many opponents of his studies of alleged psychic phenomena were representatives of “scientific naturalism”, which I stated was “not the same as ontological materialism, of which major science ‘naturalizers’ such as Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall in Britain, and Emil du … Read more