We investigated whether patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) demonstrate detectable changes in ... more We investigated whether patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) demonstrate detectable changes in biomarkers including high-sensitivity troponin T (hsTnT), N-terminal B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP), and growth differentiation factor-15 (GDF-15) over 12 months and whether such changes from baseline to 12 months are associated with the subsequent risk of stroke or systemic embolic events (S/SEE) and bleeding.
In a recent paper on ketamine and the near-death experience (NDE), Scott Rogo (1984) cited Stanis... more In a recent paper on ketamine and the near-death experience (NDE), Scott Rogo (1984) cited Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax and myself as responsible for an interpretation of NDEs that uses the concept of "archetypes". After a two-sentence statement of the archetype explanation, Rogo wrote: "The problem with this theory is that it could be called a 'non-theory,' since it explains one unknown by another (i.e., worldwide archetypes)" (p. 94). I cannot speak for
Empirical studies of near-death phenomena have been published from the viewpoint of several disci... more Empirical studies of near-death phenomena have been published from the viewpoint of several disciplines: philosophy ; parapsychology ; transpersonal psycho logy ; and psychiatry . In this book, Michael Sabom, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Emory University in Georgia, brings an almost exclusively medical perspective to bear on the study of near death experiences. Although another cardiologist, Maurice Rawlings, has previously published on this subject , his book, while not without interest, is more of a sermon than a scientific document. In contrast, Recollections of Death is a sober and objective inves tigation of near-death phenomena. While readable for the layperson, the thrust of the book is toward arousing the medical community from its dogmatic slumbers. Sabom urges that "caution should be exercised in accepting scientific belief as scientific data". Sabom himself was roused to question his scientific dogmas by Moody's Life After Life and, with Sarah Kreutziger, a psychiatric social worker, set out to investigate Moody's claims. 116 persons formed the basis of the study; 10 of these encountered their crisis event in conjunction with general anesthesia during surgery. Of the remaining 106 cases, 78 were obtained prospectively; 43 percent of these reported a near-death experience (NDE). Sabom concludes from this that NDEs are a "common" event among those who survive near-death incidents. On the whole, Sabom's findings are consonant with those of previous researchers.
Empirical studies of near-death phenomena have been published from the viewpoint of several disci... more Empirical studies of near-death phenomena have been published from the viewpoint of several disciplines: philosophy (Moody, 1975);
Our culture allows us to quantify death with precise statistics. We know that at least a million... more Our culture allows us to quantify death with precise statistics. We know that at least a million Americans so far have lost their lives to Covid-19. We have the daily numbers of mass killings in the United States; of those killed at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s criminal war; of deaths due to starvation, specific diseases, obesity, psychosis, suicide, and so on. There are new technologies that claim they will be able to predict exactly when we will die from natural causes. And so on. What seems completely absent are platforms that entertain rational discussion of what exactly death and dying are, what they mean. What happens to a person when he or she dies? Why so silent about this fundamental question? It turns out there is a small subculture of serious investigators curious about reports and conceptual issues that speak to this question. Gregory Shushan’s book, The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife is an original treatment of the subject, as...
Dictionnaire des Miracles et de l'Extraordinaire Chrétiens [Dictionary of Miracles and the Christ... more Dictionnaire des Miracles et de l'Extraordinaire Chrétiens [Dictionary of Miracles and the Christian Extraordinaire] edited by Patrick Sbalchiero. Paris: Fayard, 2002. 880 pp. €59.00. ISBN 2-213-61394-X. The nineteenth century inherited a previous skepticism, embedded within the rationalistic tradition, in the actual occurrence of the miracles of Christianity. This is what historian William Edward Hardpole Lecky referred to in the opening chapters of the fi rst volume of his History of the Rise and Infl uence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe as the "declining sense of the miraculous" (Lecky, 1887). Many intellectuals and scientists seemed to believe that the miracles of Christ, and the healings, levitations, bilocations, inedia, and luminous phenomena associated with saints were stories invented for the purpose of conversion, or had a variety of conventional explanations, such as suggestion, as in the case of stigmata. A later example of this tradition was James H. Leuba's The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (1925) where he stated that levitation was due to a loss of bodily sensation giving the illusion of fl oating. Similar to the current state of the claims of parapsychology, the study of such miracles from the assumption that the phenomena were real in the sense of requiring more than conventional explanations was left to a small number of individuals, but not to the mainstream. Nonetheless, over the years there have been scholars who have taken seriously the reality of the phenomena beyond its purely historical and symbolic aspects. A nineteenth-century example was Die christliche Mystik, translated into French as La Mystique Divine (Görres, 1836-1842/1854-1855). This was followed in the next century by works such as The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (Thurston, 1952), and by more recent works such as Encyclopédie des Phénomènes Extraordinaires dans la Vie Mystique (Boufl et, 2001-2003). The Dictionary reviewed here, although not a study by a single author, is an important reference book about the Christian literature on the topic. Dictionnaire des Miracles et de l'Extraordinaire Chrétiens is edited by Patrick Sbalchiero, historian of religion, and author of other works such as L'Eglise Face aux Miracles (Sbalchiero, 2007). In the Introduction to the Dictionary, Sbalchiero refers to the "Christian extraordinaire," or a group of psychological and physical phenomena recorded throughout the history of Christianity. He classifi es the phenomena in four groups: (1) Biblical manifestations (e.g., Jesus' virginal birth, and his miracles); (2) phenomena presented by Christian mystics, such as physical manifestations (e.g., stigmata and levitations), phenomena tak
Many single adults are confused non-virgins who are sexually active but have no real understandin... more Many single adults are confused non-virgins who are sexually active but have no real understanding of their motives for having sex or of its effects on them. They may seek philosophical counseling for sexual decisionmaking. Sexual choices can be evaluated by both an obligation standard (which asks ‘do my sexual choices keep or break rules of conduct such as “do no harm”?’) and a virtue standard (which asks ‘do my sexual choices contribute to my own individual fulfillment or are they self-destructive?’). While not ignoring how sexual behavior can hurt others, this paper focuses on the impact it has on personal happiness and moral character. It first outlines a general happiness-and-virtue ethic that applies to counseling many different everyday problems. Then, by integrating virtue ethics and social science research in human sexuality, it suggests ways in which philosophical counselors can advise confused non-virgin clients. While focusing on heterosexual behavior, its lessons apply ...
The phenomenon of possession has a long, complicated history and a dark, unsavory side. Neverthel... more The phenomenon of possession has a long, complicated history and a dark, unsavory side. Nevertheless, it has persisted in one form or another until present times. The books under review afford two perspectives on demonic possession: psychiatric and historical. Both authors are informed in their respective fields. They are critical writers and agree on a basic factual underpinning of the controversial phenomena. The grounds for this concord lie in the recurrence of the phenomena and the cumulatively large number of recorded witnesses. Both are aware of the academic prejudice toward the alleged realities of possession. Historian Brian Levack is interested in the historical and performance dimension of the untoward effects, and plays down their ontological strangeness and implications. The Swiss psychiatrist Hans Naegeli is more concerned with these implications, for example, for psychiatry, noting the unhelpfulness of standard materialist outlooks. The books are mainly complementary a...
This is a formidable book that may represent a milestone and turning point for parapsychology. Th... more This is a formidable book that may represent a milestone and turning point for parapsychology. The 800 pages are packed with information. The book can appropriately be described as a massive undertaking. A CD is included with an electronic copy of F. W. H. Myers's 1903 two-volume Human Personality and selected original reviews. This book may be a turning point because it is a serious effort to understand the mind and the relationship between psi and consciousness. It breaks from the usual parapsychology books that focus on the controversies about evidence for psi and that, at most, offer cursory speculations about how psi relates to consciousness. It is revealing that the term meta-analysis is not included in the index and there is no section describing meta-analyses findings and associated controversies. (However, an appendix, "Introductory Bibliography of Psychical Research, " does list several references on meta-analyses.)
International Journal of Philosophical Practice, 2002
The Bernoulli filter is a general, Bayes-optimal solution for tracking a single disappearing and ... more The Bernoulli filter is a general, Bayes-optimal solution for tracking a single disappearing and reappearing target, using a single sensor whose observations are corrupted by missed detections and a general, known clutter process. Like virtually all target-tracking algorithms it presumes a hidden Markov model (HMM) structure on the sensor and target. Pieczynski's pairwise Markov model (PMM) relaxes this assumption, thereby addressing correlated sensor noise and non-Markovian target motion. In an earlier paper, we derived a ''PMM Bernoulli filter'' that obeys PMM rather than restrictive HMM sensor/target statistics. This paper generalizes both the HMM and PMM Bernoulli filters to the case of multiple, possibly correlated sensors, resulting in a general, Bayes-optimal single-target tracker for complexly correlated sensors.
This book is about William James and psychical research. The author effectively makes two major p... more This book is about William James and psychical research. The author effectively makes two major points. James's interest in psychical research was lifelong and profound. Right through the last years of his life as he was writing his great philosophical works, he kept on heroically with psychical research. Knapp points out that even after all his co-explorers in England (Myers, Gurney, Hodgson, etc.) passed away, James doubled-down rather declined his interest, and wore himself weary from hours of working with mediums, often with meager results. After a lengthy Introduction on the main idea of the book, which is Knapp's methodology, it begins with a nicely textured narrative of James's early life and influences: the combative relationship with his father, life in a carnivalesque New York City, encounters with the redoubtable Sidgwicks and the more emotionally alive Myers and his wife, all very interesting and informative—the contextual grounding of James's...
One of the obstacles to progress in psychical research is irrational resistance to the phenomena.... more One of the obstacles to progress in psychical research is irrational resistance to the phenomena. Among eighteenth-century Enlightenment writers, one type of resistance was evident that has persisted until present times. To illustrate, the present paper looks at David Hume's discussion of miracles in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748/1955). Hume's essay actually lays out a good case for some extraordinary events reported about the death of the Jansenist Francois de Paris—phenomena produced by the so-called ''convulsionaries of St. Medard.'' The contradiction is resolved by Hume himself, who naively reveals what motivates him to deny the overwhelming testimony he reviews: namely, his fear of validating religion. This paper notes the same pressure to deny ''miracles'' in another eighteenth-century writer, Edward Gibbon; Gibbon, however, unlike Hume, yields to the pressure of evidence and admits one startling instance of a w...
The author introduces her remarkable book with this remark: "My interest in the voices and v... more The author introduces her remarkable book with this remark: "My interest in the voices and visions of poets and prophets was precipitated by a dear friend's claim to channel angels after her mother died." How was it possible for her friend to undergo such a substantial change in her sense of reality? How could she accept angelic encounters as really real? Witnessing this transformation galvanized Carole Brooks Platt to do twenty years of research, the present book resulting. The book indeed contains a wealth of densely packed ideas, data and references, drawn from diverse sources and disciplines. Impossible to cover so much in a brief review, I will say something about the main points. The question Platt poses is a large one. What kind of world do we inhabit? What is it like to be a human being? Do poets, prophets, mediums, and others break out of their material shells and reach into other dimensions of reality or is all that illusion, self-deception, esca...
This is the study of the creative potential of mediumship. It emphasizes a neglected and under-co... more This is the study of the creative potential of mediumship. It emphasizes a neglected and under-conceptualized form of creativity in the realm of personality development. Examples include the cases of mediums Pearl Curran, Hélѐne Smith, and Matthew Manning. Artists with mediumistic propensities are stressed, such as Keats, Rimbaud, Blake, Yeats, and James Merrill. There is discussion of Myers' theory of genius and how this bears on the concept of personal transformation. Myers' theory is used to shed light on Surrealism, outsider art, and the lives of Socrates and Joan of Arc. All this is comprehended under the Keatsian rubric of "soulmaking." Keywords: mediumship--creativity--multiplicity
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