Does it matter that some eminent scientists and intellectuals have firmly believed in ‘psychic’ phenomena? Or should we just accept vocally dismissive statements on these matters by scientifically distinguished disbelievers? This is one of several questions I touched upon in my latest article, which I was invited to contribute to a thematic issue of the … Read more
Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-1979). Image credit: Hugh Lloyd-Jones/Verlag C.H. Beck. If you enjoyed my video plug for the reading group and are keen on additional background readings about Oxford classicist Eric R. Dodds, I got you sorted: you can now download a free PDF of Dodds’s article “Why I do not believe in survival” (1934) … Read more
The third and final video in our series on poltergeist phenomena and hauntings in the history of science (and this time also medicine) has just gone live. This episode is on the longer side, as we will dwell quite a bit on twentieth-century continental Europe. Once again, you are going to encounter several figures not … 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
1874 is a significant year in the history of psychology. Wilhelm Wundt published the first edition of Outlines of Physiological Psychology, and Franz Brentano issued his epistemological study, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Another event in the same year is usually passed over by chronologists of the mind sciences: The foundation of Psychische Studien (Psychical … Read more
Ostensible ‘poltergeist phenomena’ are the very epitome of ‘things that go bump in the night’, and most modern scientists would probably relegate them to the realm of fairy tales without thinking twice. And yet, for historians studying the historical continuity of scientific interest in the supposed ‘supernatural’, they offer surprising insights. Probably coined by Martin … Read more