Angela Voss ---- Making Sense of the Paranormal: A Platonic Context for Research Methods

Making Sense of the Paranormal: A Platonic Context for Research Methods

Angela Voss (University of Exeter)

Summary for Website

Judging by the number of academic conferences, research centres and publications now focussed on ‘paranormal’ experiences, it is clear that there is both an upsurge in scholarly interest in this challenging field and a wide variety of methodologies harnessed to address it.[1] From psychical research and parapsychology, anthropology and social sciences, to literature, film and the arts, transpersonal and depth psychology and experiential frameworks based on participator observation, a vast range of extraordinary and anomalous phenomena is open to investigation by all, whether sceptic or sympathiser. However, whilst this can lead to a refreshing display of interdisciplinarity, there is also a danger that a lack of discrimination concerning the merits or appropriateness of methods used to address this non-rational realm may result in a ‘free for all’ hotch potch of contending positions and convictions, with no clear rationale with which to assess the deeper philosophical or epistemological issues involved. In my contribution to this volume, I am suggesting an approach to these issues which may inform and elucidate usages and engagements with the paranormal through providing a framework which both recognises multiple ways of knowing, and also situates them within a coherent whole. This model is essentially derived from Platonic and neoplatonic philosophy. 

Platonism has been denounced by the positivistic strand of twentieth century philosophy and science, partly because of its association with fascism and communism (Hedley & Hutton 2008: 269-282)[2] but mainly because it champions the potential of noetic cognition, a mode of perception which tends to be denied, if not destroyed, by the stronghold of the rational mind (Peter Atkins 2011, Ian McGilchrist 2009: 347, David Stove 1991: ch.7).[3] However writers such as Victoria Nelson (2001), Jeffrey Kripal (2010) and Gregory Shaw (2011)[4] call for scholars to intelligently explore hidden dimensions of experience through building bridges between the public discourses of scepticism and the private ones of authentic anomalous experience (Shaw 2011: 18). I posit that the adoption of models derived from pre-modern religious philosophy may do this through preserving the essential mystery of numinous encounters whilst also providing route maps for their exploration.

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[1] How one defines ‘paranormal’ depends on one’s definition of ‘normal’. For the purposes of this essay I am using the OED definition: ‘supposed psychical events and phenomena ... whose operation is outside the scope of the known laws of nature or of normal scientific understanding.’

[2] Hedley, D. and Hutton, S. (eds) 2008. Platonism at the Origins of Modernity  Dordrecht: Springer

[3] Atkins, P. 2011. On Being – a scientist’s exploration of the great questions of being. Oxford: Oxford

University Press; McGilchrist, I. 2010. The Master and his Emissary. Yale: Yale University Press; Stove, D. 1991. The Plato Cult and Other Follies. Oxford: Blackwell

[4] Nelson, V. 2001. The Secret Life of Puppets. Harvard: Harvard University Press;
Kripal, J. J. 2010.  Authors of the Impossible: the Paranormal and the Sacred.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Shaw, G. 2011. ‘Iamblichean Theurgy: Reflections on the Practice of Later Platonists’. Unpublished paper given at Rice University, Texas, 16/2/11.