External links
- Professor Braude's Webpage with a biography.
- Profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Stephen E. Braude | |
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| Born | April 17, 1945 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| Occupation(s) | philosopher parapsychologist |
Stephen E. Braude (born April 17, 1945) is an American philosopher and parapsychologist. He is a past president of the Parapsychological Association, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration , and a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Braude received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1971. [1] After working as a lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he found a permanent home at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, working successively as an assistant, associate, and full professor. He served as the Chair of the Philosophy department between 1998 and 2005. He has received numerous fellowships, awards, and grants including the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, numerous grants from the Parapsychology Foundation, and the Distinguished Achievement Award of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. He has also received several Faculty Research Grants from UMBC.
Braude is a past president of the Parapsychological Association, and the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Scientific Exploration . Braude is a researcher in psychic phenomena; his work has therefore been called pseudoscience. [2]
Philosophers Ronald Giere and Patrick Grim have praised Braude's work in philosophy but have written his parapsychological claims about psychokinesis being scientifically proven are based on assumption, not scientific evidence. [3] [4] The British philosopher Antony Flew criticized Braude's book The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science for defending fraudulent mediums such as Eusapia Palladino and ignoring skeptical literature on the subject. [5]
Wendy Grossman in New Scientist wrote that Braude's book The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science (1986) relied on anecdotal evidence and eyewitness testimony of séances with physical mediums, in particular, Eusapia Palladino and Daniel Dunglas Home, to prove that psi exists. According to Grossman "[Braude] accuses sceptics of ignoring the evidence he believes is solid, but himself ignores evidence that does not suit him. If a medium was caught cheating on some occasions, he says, the rest of that medium's phenomena were still genuine." Grossman came to the conclusion that Braude did not do proper research on the subject and should study "the art of conjuring." [6]
Braude has claimed the medium Daniel Dunglas Home was never caught in fraud, however the psychologist Andrew Neher has written he was detected in fraud by at least four people on different occasions. [7] Braude has also claimed Ted Serios had genuine psychic ability. [1] This is in opposition to magicians and scientists who exposed sleight of hand tricks he used. [8] [9] In an article in New Scientist titled "The Chance of a Lifetime" (March 24, 2007), an interview appears with the noted mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis. During the interview Persi mentioned that Martin Gardner had paid him to watch Ted Serios perform, during which Persi caught Serios sneaking a small marble with a photograph on it into the little tube attached to the front of the camera he used. "It was," Persi said, "a trick." [10]
Braude's latest book in defense of the paranormal is The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations (2007). According to the British psychologist Chris French the book consists of anecdotes that fail to prove the existence of psi. French gave the book a negative review and wrote "I would be surprised if any reader with the slightest tendency towards critical thinking would find the evidence for psi presented in this slim volume to be anywhere near compelling." [11]
Braude believes his wife, Gina, can produce astrological predictions. [11]
In 2014, he was awarded the Myers Memorial Medal by the Society for Psychical Research for his "significant contributions to psychical research". [12]
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Extrasensory perception or ESP, also called sixth sense, is a claimed paranormal ability pertaining to reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. The term was adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as intuition, telepathy, psychometry, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, empathy and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.
Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena and other paranormal claims, for example, those related to near-death experiences, synchronicity, apparitional experiences, etc. Criticized as being a pseudoscience, the majority of mainstream scientists reject it. Parapsychology has also been criticised by mainstream critics for many of its practitioners claiming that their studies are plausible in spite of there being no convincing evidence for the existence of any psychic phenomena after more than a century of research.
Parapsychology is a field of research that studies a number of ostensible paranormal phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and apparitional experiences.
The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is a nonprofit organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal. It describes itself as the "first society to conduct organised scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models." It does not, however, since its inception in 1882, hold any corporate opinions: SPR members assert a variety of beliefs with regard to the nature of the phenomena studied.
Telepathy is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and has remained more popular than the earlier expression thought-transference.
A ganzfeld experiment is an assessment used by parapsychologists that they contend can test for extrasensory perception (ESP) or telepathy. In these experiments, a "sender" attempts to mentally transmit an image to a "receiver" who is in a state of sensory deprivation. The receiver is normally asked to choose between a limited number of options for what the transmission was supposed to be and parapsychologists who propose that such telepathy is possible argue that rates of success above the expectation from randomness are evidence for ESP. Consistent, independent replication of ganzfeld experiments has not been achieved, and, in spite of strenuous arguments by parapsychologists to the contrary, there is no validated evidence accepted by the wider scientific community for the existence of any parapsychological phenomena. Ongoing parapsychology research using ganzfeld experiments has been criticized by independent reviewers as having the hallmarks of pseudoscience.
Dean Radin investigates phenomena in parapsychology. Following a bachelor and master's degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in educational psychology Radin worked at Bell Labs, as a researcher at Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh, and was a faculty member at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He then became Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California, USA, later becoming the president of the Parapsychological Association. He is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Radin's ideas and work have been criticized by scientists and philosophers skeptical of paranormal claims. The review of Radin's first book, The Conscious Universe, that appeared in Nature charged that Radin ignored the known hoaxes in the field, made statistical errors and ignored plausible non-paranormal explanations for parapsychological data.
Eusapia Palladino was an Italian Spiritualist physical medium. She claimed extraordinary powers such as the ability to levitate tables, communicate with the dead through her spirit guide John King, and to produce other supernatural phenomena.
Robert Henry Thouless was an English psychologist and parapsychologist. He is best known as the author of Straight and Crooked Thinking, which describes flaws in reasoning and argument.
The Psychology of the Psychic is a skeptical analysis of some of the most publicized cases of parapsychological research by psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann. The first edition, published in 1980, highlights some of the best-known cases from the 1970s. The second edition, published in 2000, adds information from the intervening 20 years as well as substantially more documentation and references to the original material.
Hereward Carrington was a well-known British-born American investigator of psychic phenomena and author. His subjects included several of the most high-profile cases of apparent psychic ability of his times, and he wrote over 100 books on subjects including the paranormal and psychical research, conjuring and stage magic, and alternative medicine. Carrington promoted fruitarianism and held pseudoscientific views about dieting.
Telekinesis is a hypothetical psychic ability allowing a person to influence a physical system without physical interaction. Experiments to prove the existence of telekinesis have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no reliable evidence that telekinesis is a real phenomenon, and the topic is generally regarded as pseudoscience.
Joseph Francis Rinn (1868–1952) was an American magician and skeptic of paranormal phenomena.
Richard Hodgson was an Australian-born psychical researcher who investigated spiritualist mediums such as Eusapia Palladino and Leonora Piper. During his later life, Hodgson became a spiritualist medium himself and believed to be in communication with spirits.
Charles Edward Mark Hansel was a British psychologist most notable for his criticism of parapsychological studies.
John Beloff was an English psychology professor at Edinburgh University and parapsychologist.
Alan Gauld is a British parapsychologist, psychologist and spiritualist writer best known for his research on the history of hypnotism and mediumship.
Francis Henry Everard Joseph Feilding best known as Everard Feilding was an English barrister, naval intelligence officer and psychical researcher.
William Wortley Baggally, most well known as W. W. Baggally, was a British psychical researcher who investigated spiritualist mediums.
Jule Eisenbud was an American psychiatrist, author and researcher known for his research into parapsychology.
