Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Vinland map
Medieval document that is supposed to be the oldest known European map of North America. The Vinland map is believed to be a European copy of a Norse map that shows the location of Viking colonies in North America around the year 1000 C.E. It is drawn in pen and ink on two parchment leaves…
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Vikings in America
Precolumbian contacts with the New World by Norse explorers. When the scholar Thormod Torfason published his Historia Vinlandae Antiquae in 1705, the news of the Scandinavian discovery of America spread throughout northern Europe. Torfason cited two Icelandic sagas to support his views: Graenlandinga Saga and Eirik’s Saga. Both told of the voyage of explorers from…
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Vestiges of the natural history of creation
A phenomenally successful and controversial book, issued anonymously in October 1844, about the “development hypothesis,” as evolutionary theory was sometimes called. Vestiges’ author was its publisher, Robert Chambers of Edinburgh, who specialized in popular periodicals. He did not admit authorship until shortly before his death in 1871, even though the book had been an immediate…
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Immanuel velikovsky
Best known as the author of Worlds in Collision (1950). He was born in Russia, emigrated to the United States in 1939, and emigrated again to Byelorus while it was still part of the USSR. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and Moscow universities, qualifying in 1921, then practicing in Pales¬ tine. In the 1930s he…
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The velikovsky affair
The controversy that arose from the works of Immanuel Velikovsky beginning with his Worlds in Collision, published in 1950. Velikovsky argued in long and scholarly works that Earth was subject to violent catastrophes in historical times and that evidence of these can be found in the myths and legends of all cultures, as well as…
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Vandermeulen spirit indicator
An instrument, also known as Rutots Spirit Indicator, intended to facilitate contact with spirit entities. The spirit indicator was invented by a young man named Vandermeulen, who died in 1930 while it was still in the testing stage. It consisted of two prisms and a fine wire triangle. The two prisms, one plain and one…
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Vampires
Primarily a Slavic legend of a blood-sucking creature, supposedly the restless soul of a heretic, criminal, or suicide. Folklore claims that the vampire leaves its burial place or coffin (sometimes in the form of a bat to fly by night) seeking to drink blood from the living and then returns to its dark grave before…
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Unification church
Founded in Korea in 1954 by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, espousing millennial and messianic doctrines plus some revelations that Moon claims to be received direct from God. It is also known as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, and its members as “Moonies.” The movement quickly started to spread and…
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Ufology
The study of the group of phenomena classed as unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The idea that strange objects seen in the sky might be a significant phenomenon for study arose out of the flying-saucer craze that began in 1947. Most cases could be explained away as misperceptions of natural objects or frauds, but those who…
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Tychonic system
A model of the planetary system named after Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). Brahe was a Danish nobleman and an energetic and meticulous astronomer, who gathered much accurate data on the planets which, on his death, passed to Kepler. Brahe lived at a time when the Catholic Church was debating the admissibility of Copernicus’s theory, which put…
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