Syllabus: PS 275 THE PARANORMAL Spring 2018 DeSales University (original) (raw)

What is the Paranormal? “The paranormal” is a comparative category that serves as a dumping ground for a wide variety of beliefs, experiences and claims that fall outside the normative boundaries of our culture’s notions of scientific reasoning and conventional religious doctrines. By default, both scientific and religious elites have left it to experimental psychology and psychiatry to try to make sense of these domains of human experience, and more than a century of such research has much to tell us about how to critically evaluate this material. However, psychology is not enough to grasp all of the dimensions of the paranormal. Therefore, as we develop our “tool kit” of critical thinking skills we will need to also approach this material from perspectives in philosophy, sociology, comparative religions, anthropology, history and investigative journalism. This course, then, will be multidisciplinary in its approach, with insights from psychological research providing the Ariadne’s thread to help us find our way through and out of this labyrinth. After all, we don’t really want to meet the Minotaur (or Mothman), now do we?