Rough Metaphysics: The Speculative Thought and Mediumship of Jane Roberts
Peter Skafish, "Rough Metaphysics: The Speculative Thought and Mediumship of Jane Roberts"
English | ISBN: 1517915163 | 2023 | 394 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 1517915163 | 2023 | 394 pages | PDF | 2 MB
A powerful case for why anthropology should study outsiders of thought and their speculative ideas
What sort of thinking is needed to study anomalies in thought? In this trenchantly argued and beautifully written book, anthropologist Peter Skafish explores this provocative question by examining the writings of the medium and “rough metaphysician” Jane Roberts (1929–1984). Through a close interpretation of her own published texts as well as those she understood herself to have dictated for her cohort of channeled personalities—including one, named “Seth,” who would inspire the New Age movement—Skafish shows her intuitive and dreamlike work to be a source of rigorously inventive ideas about science, ontology, translation, and pluralism. Arguing that Roberts’s writings contain philosophies ahead of their time, he also asks: How might our understanding of speculative thinking change if we consider the way untrained writers, occult visionaries, and their counterparts in other cultural traditions undertake it? What can outsider thinkers teach us about the limitations of even our most critical intellectual habits?
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