William James and the Occult: Download a Free PDF of my Oxford Handbook Chapter, “James and Psychical Research in Context”

I’m glad to share the news that my contribution to the Oxford Handbook of William James has just appeared in an electronic version ahead of print.

William James at a slate-writing seance with the medium Mrs. Walden (probably late 1890s. Image Credit: James papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS.Am.1092.[1]).

Chapter summary:

James’s open advocacy, practice, and defense of unrestrictedly empirical approaches to telepathy, mediumship, and other alleged “supernatural” phenomena was a central part of his work, yet it is still often misunderstood or passed over. By placing James back into an international network of contemporary elite intellectuals who were also preoccupied with reported occult phenomena as fundamental scientific anomalies that may or may not have spiritual significance, this chapter argues that James’s psychical research can be reconciled with the progressiveness for which his canonical ideas are often regarded.

When appreciated within important political and medical contexts of his time, and in view of his long-term collaborations in the study of trance states and hallucinations in non- pathological populations with F. W. H. Myers and other figures connected to Henry Sidgwick in England, James’s psychical research was an integral part of his evolving experimental psychology. Growing out of James’s deep discontent with dogmatism in science and religion, his unorthodox work also shared mutual origins with his pragmatist and radical empiricist philosophy.

Moreover, by illustrating the polemical nature of simultaneous attacks on James’s psychical research and pragmatism by fellow psychologists, and the employment of religious arguments by supposedly scientific critics, this chapter suggests the story of James and psychical research is a reminder that “scientific naturalism” as an inconsistently defined yet absolute standard of modern Western academic activity has grown out of concerns that were not as self-evidently science-based or humanistic as we may be accustomed to believe.

The chapter is divided into the following sections:

I. Introduction

II. Scientists, Miracles, and the Politics of Degeneration

III. James and the American Society for Psychical Research Revisited

IV. The “Disenchanted” Absolute

V. The Right to Investigate: Pragmatism and Pathologies of Prior Belief

VI. Conclusion

VII. References

VIII. Notes

Since research for the chapter was partly based on my previously Wellcome Trust-funded work, readers without electronic access will be pleased that Oxford University Press allowed me to comply with the Wellcome Open Access policy by kindly granting me permission to make a PDF file of my chapter freely available here.

Those with institutional access to the Oxford Handbook series are encouraged to download the chapter on the Oxford University Press website.

Until the publication of the Handbook’s physical edition (probably some time next year), the chapter can be cited as follows:

Sommer, Andreas. (2020). “James and psychical research in context.” In Alexander Klein (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of William James. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395699.013.37 (Epub ahead of print)