Jack Hunter's Blog - Posts Tagged "psi"

"This fair and reasoned approach to the supernatural in other cultures is typified by the recent emergence of paranthropology as a renewed anthropological approach to the paranormal. Paranthropology is a rejuvenation of the transpersonal anthropology that arose in the 1970s, largely as a backlash to intellectual prejudice against honest and open reporting of paranormal phenomena by anthropologists at that time. Paranthropology offers a fresh approach to the phenomena in that it attempts to avoid making a priori judgements about the reality, or not, of different experiences and beliefs, and instead aims to explore the phenomena in the spirit of Joseph K. Long, in that, ‘a persistent ignoring of the relevancy of parapsychology in anthropology is nothing less than scientistic ethnocentricism.’ Indeed the very acceptance of these phenomena as experiences at least worthy of scientific consideration harks back to the writings of the father of American psychology, William James, who in his posthumous treatise on ‘Radical Empiricism’ entreated researchers to include all experience under the rubric of science. Celebrating the centenary of that book in 2012, we are reminded by William James that, ‘to be radical an empiricism must neither admit into its construction any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them [sic] any element that is directly experienced.'"

- Dr. David Luke (Co-Author of 'Anomalistic Psychology')