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
In the decades around 1600, the astrologers Simon Forman and Richard Napier produced one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history. With support from the Wellcome Trust, a team of scholars at the University of Cambridge (the Casebooks Project) has transformed this paper archive into a digital archive. Today, the Project’s director, … 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
Folks: Times are tough, so I reluctantly decided to start selling bits from my library. The first item I just put up for auction on eBay is a pretty rare one: “On the so-called Divining Rod, or Virgula Divina”, by William Barrett (1897). Published as Part 32 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical … Read more
Hasok Chang is Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and the current British Academy Wolfson Research Professor. A past President of the British Society for this History of Science, Hasok is the author of Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism (Springer, 2012), and Inventing Temperature: Measurement … 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
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
Thanks to those of you who participated in the poll on the future design of Forbidden Histories, which has closed yesterday. Participation was a little on the meagre side with only 88 votes, but the people have spoken and it seems we’re stuck with the current design (Option 1 in the poll) for the foreseeable … Read more
When I knocked together the short movie-style teaser currently featured on the Welcome page, I had only the faintest ideas of concrete challenges involved in the production of the planned full video episodes. So with other work to deal with, it took me much longer than anticipated to shoot and edit the first full episode … Read more