Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)
Scientist, artist, editor, and founder of anthroposophy a spiritual movement that is the basis for much of the New Age thinking in Europe and North America today. Adherents believe that there is a spiritual world of pure thought that exists detached from the human brain, yet is accessible to those who have been trained to…
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Steinach rejuvenation operation
Procedure intended to restore youthfulness to men and women. Throughout the 19th century, many physiologists and anatomists believed that secondary sexual characteristics the deepening of the voice and the appearance of facial hair in males and the development of breasts in females were caused by an internal secretion poured into the blood by the sex…
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Squaring the circle
The idea that there could be a method of taking a circle and constructing from it a square that had exactly the same area and the same perimeter. Although the idea has a long history and although it has long been known that it is impossible, it nevertheless persisted for centuries, so much so that…
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Johann Christophe Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832)
Co-creator and popularizer of the basic principles of Pherenology. Born into a Lutheran farming family in Germany, Spurzheim initially intended to enter the ministry and studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, philosophy, and divinity in his hometown and at the University of Treves. Although many of his later endeavors retained an evangelical sense of mission and optimism,…
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Spontaneous generation
The belief that under certain conditions living creatures can be produced directly from matter. The concept is well attested in classical sources, notably Aristotle, and is probably based on even more ancient observations of the emergence of organisms such as fly larvae from dead animal tissue or worms form mud. General considerations have distinguished between…
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Spiritualism
In philosophy, a way of thinking that believes in immaterial reality, that is, knowledge perceived to be extrasensory, that is by some means other than through the normal five senses. Spiritualism, as opposed to materialism, is a very broad category and could apply to any acceptance of an infinite personal God, the immortality of the…
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Spirit photography
The photographing of ghosts or other spirits, popularized during the spiritualism era of the middle and late 19th century. In 1862, a Boston photographer, William H. Mumler, discovered on one of his photographs a human image besides that of his sitter. Although his subject, a Dr. Gardner, had been posing alone, the photographic plate showed…
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Spiricom
An apparatus designed in the 1980s to facilitate contact with the dead. The Spiricom appeared in the wake of the interest in electronic voice phenomena, in which very faint voices were heard on tape recordings, recorded at higher than normal speeds. It was developed by engineer George W. Meek of Metascience Foundation, Inc. At the…
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Lewis Spence (1874-1955)
A firm advocate of the reality of Atlantis. In the seven books he wrote on the subject, including The Problem of Atlantis (1924), he drew on evidence from geology, biology, and archaeology to substantiate the ancient myth. He drew a parallel between the decadence of the ancient Atlanteans and the present- day Europeans, particularly the…
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Speculations in science and technology
A speculative journal published four times a year by Science and Technology Letters in Northwood, Middlesex, England. Its editor is Professor Alan Mackay, a crystallographer of Birkbeck College, and it has an international editorial board. It incorporates Developments in Chemical Engineering. There are about twelve articles in each issue, a mixture of normal chemical engineering…
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