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
Though William James is now mostly remembered as a philosopher, he was one of two ‘founding fathers’ of modern professionalized psychology. While his German counterpart, Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, dismissed empirical approaches to reported psychic phenomena and spiritualism, James on the contrary sought to make the study of unorthodox phenomena a legitimate part of nascent … Read more
Last Thursday I had the privilege of giving a talk in the excellent Damaging the Body lecture series, ably organised at Barts Museum of Pathology, London, by Jo Parsons and Sarah Chaney. Surrounded by hundreds of jars filled with various organs and body parts of dead people (no nibbles were served in case you’re wondering), … 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