You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Max Weber famously characterized the ongoing process of intellectualization and rationalization that separates the natural world from the divine (by excluding magic and value from the realm of science, and reason and fact from the realm of religion) as the "disenchantment of the world." Egil Asprem argues for a conceptual shift in how we view this key narrative of modernity. Instead of a sociohistorical process of disenchantment that produces increasingly rational minds, Asprem maintains that the continued presence of "magic" and "enchantment" in people's everyday experience of the world created an intellectual problem for those few who were socialized to believe that nature should contain no such incalculable mysteries. Drawing on a wide range of early twentieth-century primary sources from theoretical physics, occultism, embryology, radioactivity, psychical research, and other fields, Asprem casts the intellectual life of high modernity as a synchronic struggle across conspicuously different fields that shared surprisingly similar intellectual problems about value, meaning, and the limits of knowledge.
By now, parapsychology should have become an accepted scientific field of research. However, there is great resistance to parapsychological research despite the strength of evidence in favor of conducting it. This collection of essays focuses on the future of the psychical research field. One essay speculates about a kind of future when psychic phenomena are studied in every university. Another identifies 10 areas of potential difficulty facing parapsychology. Other essays indicate areas where conclusions may need re-examination and refinement and presents possibilities for innovative approaches to future study. Some of the areas of study covered include altered states of consciousness, ESP, Meta-Analysis, the theory of psychopraxia, and sociological and phenomenological issues.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1923.