Apparently, Cambridge academic hauntology and ghost studies were a thing: go figure.
The society was not cloistered off from the rest of the academic world. Discussions about psychical phenomena spilt over into the most respected philosophy journals of the period. For example, one of the 1902 issues of The Monist included a paper entitled ‘Spirit or Ghost’ by Paul Carus (the journal’s editor), and musings about life after death, precognitions and telepathy also appeared in the journals Mind, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Philosophy. Soon after the turn of the century, popular interest in psychical research began to wane. Ectoplasm turned out to be cheesecloth. Levitating tables were discovered to be attached to fishing wire. Ghosts emerging, in near complete darkness, from ‘spiritual cabinets’ looked suspiciously like the mediums themselves dressed in white robes. But the philosophical fascination with paranormal phenomena continued. Long after psychical research had been pushed out of biology, psychology and physics departments to the margins of academia, professional philosophers continued theoretical discussions about its findings unabated. There is no better example of the symbiosis of academic philosophy and psychical research than C D Broad. ©
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