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book2022

The Superhumanities

Disciplines:
religion
parapsychology
consciousness
humanities
spirituality/kripal

Summary

Jeff Kripal's 2022 manifesto arguing that the humanities need to take seriously the anomalous experiences that have always been their primary subject — and that doing so requires expanding the humanities into what Kripal calls the 'superhumanities' where consciousness, paranormal experience, and academic rigor converge.

Core Contribution

Argues that the humanities' commitment to historicist and constructivist explanations (all experience is socially constructed) has made them incapable of engaging seriously with the one class of human experiences that most insistently points beyond social construction — mystical and anomalous experiences — and that recovering seriousness about these experiences requires a new methodology.

Historical Influences

Jeff Kripal

Intellectual Lineage

Jeff Kripal Research Rice University

Allied Works

Authors of the Impossible Kali's Child

Contemporaries & Peers

They Flew Mutants and Mystics

Minds Influenced

Religious studies Jonathan Bi

Intellectual Posterity

The Superhumanities SuperhumanitiesKripal's manifesto

Discussing

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