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William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death
Penguin
August 2006
Featuring: William James; Henry James
384 pages
ISBN: 1594200904
EAN: 9781594200908
Hardcover
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Fiction
What if a world-renowned professor of psychology at Harvard
University, a doctor and scientist acclaimed as one of the
leading intellects of the time, suddenly announced that he
believed in ghosts? At the close of the nineteenth century,
to great public and professional astonishment, William
James-the great philosopher, a founder of the American
Psychological Association and brother of Henry James-did
just that and embarked on a determined, lifelong pursuit of
scientific evidence to prove it. James came together with two other brilliant and charismatic
thinkers of the day-Richard Hodgson, a converted skeptic,
and James Hyslop, a natural grandstander who would often
visit mediums unannounced, a hooded mask covering his
face-to form the core of the American Society for Psychical
Research. They eventually merged with the British Society
for Psychical Research, adding to the group the Cambridge
philosopher Henry Sidgwick and his tiny, ferociously smart
wife Eleanor, as well as the mythically handsome Edmund
Gurney and others. While studies of ESP and ghostly
visitations have occurred since the days of the society, at
no other time have scientists of the caliber of James and
his colleagues devoted themselves in such an ambitious and
driven way for evidence of a life beyond. James and his band
of brothers staked their reputations, their careers, even
their sanity, on one of the most extraordinary (and
entertaining) psychological quests ever undertaken, a quest
that brought its followers right up against the limits of
science. This riveting book is about the investigation of the ghost
stories-the instances of supernatural phenomena that could
not be explained away-and it is about the courage and
conviction of William James and his colleagues to study
science with an open mind. At the heart of the story is the
ongoing tension between empiricism and spiritualism-between
a way of explaining the world that is grounded in the purely
tangible and a way that is grounded in a mixture of the
evident and the hidden. Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Deborah Blum uses her extraordinary storytelling skills and
scientific insight to explore nothing less than the nexus of
science and religion. It is a territory as fascinating to us
now as it was to William James and his colleagues then.
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