Society for Psychical Research
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The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is a non-profit organization which started in the United Kingdom and was later imitated in other countries. Its stated purpose is to understand "events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal by promoting and supporting important research in this area" and to "examine allegedly paranormal phenomena in a scientific and unbiased way."[1] It was founded in 1882 by a group of eminent thinkers including Edmund Gurney, Frederic William Henry Myers, William Fletcher Barrett, Henry Sidgwick, and Edmund Dawson Rogers.
The Society's headquarters are in Marloes Road, London.
It publishes the quarterly Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (JSPR), the irregular Proceedings and the magazine Paranormal Review. It holds an annual conference, regular lectures and two study days per year. Its French equivalent, the French Society for Psychical Research, publishes the Journale de la Société Française pour Recherche Psychique (JSFRP), which means "Journal of the French Society for Psychical Research" in English. Its American counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research, publishes the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (JASPR).
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[edit] Purpose and organization
Its purpose was to encourage scientific research into psychic or paranormal phenomena in order to establish their truth. Research was initially aimed at six areas: telepathy, mesmerism and similar phenomena, mediums, apparitions, physical phenomena associated with séances and, finally, the history of all these phenomena. The Society is run by a President and a Council of twenty people. The organisation is divided between London and Cambridge (where the archives are located), the London headquarters were initially at 14 Dean's Yard. A French branch of the Society was formed in 1885 as the Société Française pour Recherche Psychique (SFRP), which means "French Society for Psychical Research" in English. Later, an American branch of the Society was formed as the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), becoming an affiliate of the original SPR in 1890. American writers sometimes incorrectly call the SPR the British Society for Psychical Research (BSPR), to distinguish it from the American SPR, but the modifer should not be added.
[edit] List of Presidents
| The presidents of the Society for Psychical Research | |
| 1882-1884 | Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), philosopher |
| 1885-1887 | Balfour Stewart (1827-1887), physicist |
| 1888-1892 | Henry Sidgwick (→ 1882) |
| 1893 | Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, originator of the well known Balfour Declaration |
| 1894-1895 | William James (1842-1910) psychologist, philosopher |
| 1896-1899 | Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), physicist, chemist |
| 1900 | Frederick William Henry Myers (1843-1901), philologist and philosopher |
| 1901-1903 | Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), physicist |
| 1904 | Sir William Fletcher Barrett (1845-1926), physicist |
| 1905 | Charles Robert Richet (1850-1935), physiologist, Nobel Prize winner |
| 1906-1907 | Gerald Balfour (1853-1945), politician, brother of Arthur Balfour |
| 1908-1909 | Eleanor Sidgwick (1845-1936), mathematician, wife of Henry Sidgwick, sister of Arthur Balfour |
| 1910 | Henry Arthur Smith (1848-1922), lawyer |
| 1911 | Andrew Lang (1844-1912), anthropologist and writer |
| 1912 | William Boyd Carpenter (1841-1918), Bishop |
| 1913 | Henri Bergson (1859-1941) philosopher; Nobel Prize winner for literature 1927. |
| 1914 | Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864-1937), philosopher |
| 1915-1916 | George Gilbert Aime Murray (1866-1957), philologist |
| 1917-1918 | Lawrence Pearsall Jacks (1860-1955), professor of philosophy in Oxford |
| 1919 | John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842-1919), physicist, Nobel Prize 1904 |
| 1920-1921 | William McDougall (1871-1938), psychologist |
| 1922 | Thomas Walter Mitchell (1869-1944), editor of the British journal of medical psychology |
| 1923 | Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), astronomer |
| 1924-1925 | John George Piddington (1869-1952), businessman |
| 1926-1927 | Hans Driesch (1867-1941), German biologist and natural philosopher |
| 1928-1929 | Sir Lawrence Jones (1885-1955) |
| 1930-1931 | Walter Franklin Prince (1863-1934), clergyman |
| 1932 | Eleanor Sidgwick (→ 1908) and Oliver Joseph Lodge (→ 1901) |
| 1933-1934 | Edith Lyttelton (born Balfour; 1865-1948), playwright |
| 1935-1936 | C. D. Broad (1887-1971), philosopher |
| 1937-1938 | Robert Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh (1875-1947), physicist |
| 1939-1941 | Henri Haberley Price (1899-1984), philosopher |
| 1942-1944 | Robert Henry Thouless (1894-1984), psychologist |
| 1945-1946 | George N. M. Tyrrell (1879-1952), mathematician |
| 1947-1948 | William Henry Salter (1880-1969), lawyer |
| 1949 | Gardner Murphy (1895-1979), psychologist |
| 1950-1951 | Samuel George Soal (1889-1975), mathematician |
| 1952 | Gilbert Murray (→ 1915) |
| 1953-1955 | Frederick Stratton (1881-1960), astrophysicist, professor in Cambridge |
| 1956-1958 | Guy William Lambert (1889-1984), diplomat |
| 1958-1960 | C. D. Broad (→ 1935) |
| 1960-1961 | Henri Habberley Price (→ 1939) |
| 1960-1963 | Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-1979), professor of Greek studies in Birmingham and Oxford |
| 1963-1965 | Donald James West (* 1924), psychiatrist and criminologist |
| 1965-1969 | Sir Alister Hardy (1896-1985), zoologist |
| 1969-1971 | W. A. H. Rushton (1901-1980), physiologist, professor in Cambridge |
| 1971-1974 | Clement William Kennedy Mundle (* 1920), philosopher |
| 1974-1976 | John Beloff (1920-2006), psychologist at the University of Edinburgh |
| 1976-1979 | Arthur J. Ellison (1920-2000), technologist |
| 1980 | Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980), biologist and parapsychologist |
| 1980 | Louisa Ella Rhine (1891-1983), parapsychologist, wife of Joseph Rhine |
| 1981-1983 | Arthur J. Ellison (→ 1976) |
| 1984-1988 | Donald James West (→ 1963) |
| 1988-1989 | Ian Stevenson (1918-2007), psychiatrist |
| 1989-1992 | Alan Gauld, psychologist |
| 1993-1995 | Archie Roy, professor of astronomy in Glasgow, founded the Scottish SPR in 1987 |
| 1995-1998 | David Fontana, professor of psychology at Cardiff University |
| 1998-1999 | Donald James West (→ 1963, → 1984) |
| 2000-2004 | Bernard Carr, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London |
| 2005-2007 | John Poynton, Biologist |
| 2007- | Deborah Delanoy, parapsychologist |
[edit] Today
The Society states its principal aim as "understanding events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal by promoting and supporting important research in this area." The Society has gathered and disseminated a great deal of data relating to the paranormal. The SPR publishes three peer-reviewed scientific journals,[not in citation given] the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the Journal of the French Society for Psychical Research, and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. The Society has built up an extensive library and archive, part of which is held at the University of Cambridge.[2][3]
The Society has many well known figures among its members, including parapsychologists Dean Radin, Peter Underwood, Charles Tart, Tom Ruffles, Ciarán O'Keeffe, and Louie Savva. Investigators of spontaneous phenomena (hauntings, etc.) include the late Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair who are best known for the Enfield Poltergeist[4]. Contrary to popular belief[citation needed], Susan Blackmore is no longer a parapsychologist.
[edit] References
- ^ SPR website
- ^ SPR website
- ^ Edinburgh University Website
- ^ Playfair, G.L. & Grosse, M. (1988). "Enfield revisited: The evaporation of positive evidence". Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 55 pp.208-219
- Vernon Harrison. (1997) H. P. Blavatsky and the SPR. ISBN 1-55700-119-7
[edit] External links
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