– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
Such philosophical streams have recently been revived and renewed by the analytic philosopher Stephen E. Braude, who as a graduate student and self-described arrogant hardnosed materialist witnessed a table lift off the floor and communicate tapping messages to him and two friends during an impromptu séance session. “Now I won’t mince words,” Braude writes. “What happened that afternoon scared the hell out of me. For three hours I observed my own table tilt up and down, without visible assistance.” The scholarly result? Nothing, until he got tenure (“I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid”). Since then he has written five especially provocative books, all of which orbit around the questions posed by that floating, tapping table and his intuitive suspicion that it was the three of them who controlled the table with still unknown, unconscious, unacknowledged powers.
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