Parapsychology: Naturalising The Supernatural, Re-Enchanting Science

Abstract

Parapsychology has helped facilitate a modern discourse on purportedly “occult” and “supernatural” phenomena in which the authority of science occupies the high seat. In this article, parapsychology is defined as the organised attempt to create a scientific discipline out of a field of knowledge typically associated with the occult and supernatural. Taken in this sense, we may date its beginnings to the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in England in 1882, representing a group of scientists, philosophers and other scholars organised on the model of the scientific society or club, striving towards serious recognition by other scientific communities and professional societies.2 In the early decades of the 20th century the approach of the SPR spread to other countries, spawning a discourse which transformed, in the 1930s, into modern professional parapsychology, famously headed by Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University. The attempt to establish a discipline for scientific research on phenomena typically considered “supernatural” attests, on the one hand,