Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Parapsychology”

Episode 152: The Science of Things Spiritual: Live in Lily Dale

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 11:15:00 -0400

On the last week of July, 2023, Phil and JF were delighted to speak at Shannon Taggart's Science of Things Spiritual Symposium in Lily Dale, the nerve centre of the Spiritualist movement. As speakers, your hosts were part of an inspiring lineup of scholars, artists, and researchers committed to exploring the borderlands of art, science, religion, and the paranormal. They also had the honour of launching the symposium with a live recording held on the evening of the July 27th. The topic was Frederic W. H. Myers' autobiographical essay, "Fragments of Inner Life," first published in full in 1961, some sixty years after the author's death. Myers was one of the original members of the Society for Psychical Research in England. A poet and classicist, he remained committed to the scientific promise of paranormal investigation until the end of his life. His book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, also published posthumously, argues that psychical studies have confirmed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that death is just the beginning. In this talk, JF and Phil discuss Myers' relevance to 21st-century thinking on the Weird.

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REFERENCES

The Science of Things Spiritual Symposium: July 27-29, 2023
Frederic Myers, Fragments of Inner Life
Alan Bennett, History Boys
Arthur Machen, A Fragment of Life
Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan
Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug
Daniel Dennett, American cognitive scientist

Frederic Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death
Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being
Phil Ford, Dig
William James, Principles of Psychology
Akashic Record, Theosophical idea
Jeff Kripal, Authors of the Impossible

Episode 108: On Skepticism and the Paranormal

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 10:30:00 -0400

Modern skeptics pride themselves on being immune to unreason. They present themselves as defenders of rationality, civilization, and good sense against what Freud famously called the "black mud-tide of occultism." But what if skepticism was more implicated in the phenomena it aims to banish than it might appear to be? What if no one could debunk anything without getting some of that black mud on their hands? In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the weird complicity of the skeptic and the believer in the light of George P. Hansen's masterpiece of meta-parapsychology, The Trickster and the Paranormal.

REFERENCES

George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal

James Randi, stage magician and paranormal debunker
Michael Shermer, American science writer
CSICOP, Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, Publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer
Rune Soup, Interview with George P. Hansen
Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell
Weird Studies, Episode 89 on Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
Wouter Hanegraaff, Dutch professor of esoteric philosophy
Shannon Taggart, Seance
Society for Psychical Research
Weird Studies, Episode 44 on William James’s Psychical Research
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Robert Anton Wilson, American author
Aleister Crowley, Magic Without Tears

Episode 44: Doomed to Enchantment: The Psychical Research of William James

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 11:30:00 -0400

The great American thinker William James knew well that no intellectual pursuit is purely intellectual. His interest in the "supernormal," whether it take the form of spiritual apparition or extrasensory perception, was rooted in a personal desire to uncover the miraculous in the mundane. Indeed, the early members of the British Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart (which James co-founded in 1884) were united in this conviction that certain phenomena which most scientists of their day considered unworthy of their attention were in fact the frontier of a new world, an avenue for humanity's deepest aspirations. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss two papers that James wrote about the first phase in the history of these research societies. James lays bare his conclusions about the reality of psychical phenomena and its scientific significance. The bizarre fact that psychical research has made little progress since its inception lays the ground for an engaging discussion on the limits of the knowable.

REFERENCES

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Frederic W. H. Myers, theorist of the "subliminal self"
Weird Studies, Episode 37: Entities
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka "Darwin's Bulldog"
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld
Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
James Randi, professional skeptic
Dean Radin, Real Magic
Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Lionel Snell a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes, British magician
Changeling: The Lost tabletop roleplaying game
Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Joshua Ramey, "[Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux]("Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux")"
C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle