The cover of “Philosophy Bites: 25 Philosophers on 25 Intriguing Subjects” (Oxford; $15.95) sports a simple line drawing of a duck. Or does it? Mentally re-orient the picture, and the duck's beak becomes a rabbit's ears. The classic illusion makes a fitting mascot for philosophy, which is a field in the business not of collecting new facts about the world, but of figuring out how to look at the facts we already have.

The reader can perform a similar mental morph on the book itself, which is a collection of twenty-five interviews with professional philosophers, adapted from the popular “Philosophy Bites” podcast. Look at it one way, and it's an introduction to a broad range of topics in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, religion, politics, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. But shift your focus from the answers to the questions themselves, and it becomes another book altogether: a practical manual on how to talk to philosophers.

There's no shortage of potential pitfalls in philosophical discussions, but interviewer Nigel Warburton leads by example in avoiding many of them. The first step: Never hesitate to ask, “What do you mean by that word?” It's a simple rule, yet perennially neglected, resulting in countless intractable arguments between people who never realize they're talking about different things. So Warburton wisely kicks off each interview by inviting his guest to define what she means by “minority,” or “natural,” or “rights,” or whatever that particular philosopher specializes in.

Sometimes the answers he gets are surprisingly thought-provoking. It may seem odd at first to hear bioethicist Peter Singer define “person” to mean “someone who is aware of their own existence over time,” but upon reflection, it seems even odder that our language never had a word for this concept before. Why do we use the words “person” and “human” interchangeably, when there are humans who are not self-aware, such as infants, and non-humans who are at least somewhat self-aware, such as chimpanzees? Singer's implication is that making this distinction in our language allows us to make a corresponding distinction in our ethics: when deciding what rights to bestow on other beings, should we be considering their species, or their personhood?

But while good definitions can clarify our thinking, bad ones only make it foggier. Theologian Don Cupitt, for example, says he does not consider himself an atheist, because he defines the word “God” to mean “a goal of life” or a “symbol of perfection.” One is tempted to ask, “Why? What is the point of redefining 'God' so completely that it must exist simply by definition?” Warburton is a little too polite to ask those questions, unfortunately, but it's a prime example of the kind of verbal sleight-of-hand that philosophy should ideally be debunking, not promoting.

The fog hangs heavy around several other chapters as well. Asked to define “infinity,” metaphysician Adrian Moore replies that it is undefinable, because “if you're trying to define the concept, then what you're trying to do is pin it down in some way, circumscribe it, give it parameters,” he says, which in his view contradicts the concept's very nature. This evidently strikes Moore as appealingly paradoxical, but it leaves him in the unfortunate position of being unable to say anything more coherent about his topic than “The infinite embraces everything.”

This sort of nebulousness is another hazard of philosophy, but Warburton generally succeeds in bringing the conversations back to Earth by following a second rule: Use examples. Test-driving his guests' abstract arguments on specific cases not only keeps the questions well-defined, but also makes us aware of why the answers might be important. So in order to address the age-old issue of whether everything people value can be viewed as a form of pleasure, Alex Neill examines our reactions to watching a tragedy like King Lear. Similarly, the abstract question of what constitute “natural” human limitations becomes tractable when Michael Sandel discusses why it doesn't ruin the satisfaction of watching a marathon if we allow the runners to wear shoes, but it does ruin a baseball game if we allow the players to take steroids.

But “Philosophy Bites” could have had an even sharper bite if Warburton had more consistently applied another guideline for discussing philosophy: Make sure your questions have answers. Sometimes they don't, which should be a tip-off that they were poorly formed questions to begin with. The interview with Timothy Williamson on vagueness is a particularly frustrating case in point. Williamson raises examples of cases in which it's not clear if a particular word applies: is this color red, or not red? Is that man tall, or not tall? He agrees the answers depend on the cutoff point, but he still thinks there is some objectively “right” answer in the borderline cases, albeit an unknowable one. “Yes, even if we could be bothered to count the exact number of hairs on Tony Blair's head we still wouldn't necessarily know whether he was bald or not. But either he is or he isn't,” Williamson argues.

That kind of hair-splitting helps neither people's understanding of the world nor their opinion of philosophy. Especially when contrasted with the examples of genuinely good philosophy sprinkled throughout the book – examples in which careful questioning of our language does yield new insight – it's clear that once we know how many strands of hair are on a man's head, we learn nothing by inquiring whether he is “really” bald or not. It's like looking at the cover of “Philosophy Bites” and wondering: “Yes, but is it really a duck, or is it really a rabbit?”

In 1953 the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle calculated that the production of carbon would not occur with sufficient probability unless that probability was boosted by the presence of an excited nuclear state of C12 at about 7.7 MeV. In what appeared to be a remarkable victory for anthropic reasoning, the existence of such a state was quickly confirmed experimentally. Anthropic reasoning is inferring that some property of nature must exist for life, as we know it, to be possible. The Hoyle prediction has been regarded by theists and others as a miraculous example of the fine-tuning of the constants of physics needed to make life possible. As Hoyle, a professed atheist, remarked:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

You will find the Hoyle resonance, us­ually accompanied by the above quotation, prominently included in every discussion about fine-tuning. Let us examine the scientific facts in more detail.

Fig. 1(a) shows two energy levels: (1) the amount by which the total rest energy of Be8 + He4 exceeds that of C12, which is 7.3367 MeV; (2) the excited state of C12 predicted by Hoyle and observed at 7.656 MeV. Note that Hoyle did not predict this value exactly but estimated that the energy level should be around 7.7 MeV.

Now it is often claimed that this excited state has to be fine-tuned to precisely this value in order for carbon-based life to exist. This is not true. Life might be possible over a range of carbon abundances.

In 1989 Mario Livio and his collaborators performed calculations to test the sensitivity of stellar nucleosynthesis to the exact position of the ob­served C12 ex­cited state. They de­termined that a 0.06 MeV increase in the location of the level to 7.716 MeV would not significantly alter the carbon production in stellar environments. A de­crease by the same amount to 7.596 MeV was needed before the carbon production in­creased significantly above its value in our universe. This range is shown in Fig. 1(b). Already we can see the excited state is not very fine-tuned.

Finally, we note that the problem is not to obtain the exact amount of carbon in our universe but just sufficient carbon production for life. We get more carbon when the Hoyle energy level is even lower. Further­more, Livio et al. showed that the energy level can be increased by as much as 0.277 MeV to 7.933 MeV before insufficient carbon is produced. As Fig. 1(c) shows, an excited state anywhere from this energy down to near the minimum energy would produce adequate carbon. In short, no fine-tuning was necessary to produce sufficient carbon in stars for life as we know it to be possible. While nuclear theorists are unable to calculate the precise energy level of the Hoyle resonance, they know enough about how the carbon nucleus is formed to show that a resonance in the allowed region is very likely.

Further Reading

F. Hoyle, et al., “A State in C12 Predicted From Astro­nomical Evidence,” Physical Review Let­ters 92 (1953): 1096.

M. Livio, et al., “The Anthropic Significance of the Existence of an Excited State of C12,” Nature 340 (1989): 281–86.

Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez, “Looking for Life in the Multiverse: Universes with Different Physical Laws Might Still Be Habitable,” Scien­tific American (January, 2010): 42–49.

When I eagerly talked about what I planned to do, close acquaintances ex­claimed in bemused horror: “But they’re the weirdos who believe it all, aren’t they?” One even pointed out that when she heard I was studying anything to do with the para­normal in the first place, she thought I must be certifiably mad: “If you come out of this tipping tables and flashing those funny-shape cards everywhere you go . . .”

So what led me to try a ten-week online course called “Introduction to Parapsy­chol­ogy”? First, the course is run by the Koest­ler Parapsychology Unit, based in the Psychology Department at the University of Edinburgh. Although it offers a non-accredited course, meaning that there is no formal assessment or qualification gained, the de­part­ment appears to be valuable as an authoritative unit on the subject of parapsychology. The course coordinator, Caroline Watt, even coauthored the fifth edition of “An Intro­duction to Parapsy­chol­ogy,” the most frequently adopted text by those presenting academic courses on parapsychology and anomalistic psychology. I had come across her work in conjunction with well-known skeptical figure Richard Wise­man while doing my own MEd studies on paranormal belief. In fact, Wiseman did his PhD in Psychology under the supervision of Edin­burgh’s first Koestler professor of parapsychology, Robert L. Morris.

Within the U.K. and on the European continent, there appears to be a well-established number of parapsychology research groups situated within higher education institutions, for example, the Centre for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes at the University of Northampton and the Ano­malistic Psychology Re­search Unit at Gold­smiths College, University of Lon­don (the alma mater of another researcher I greatly admire, Krissie Wil­son of the University of Tasmania). With representatives of these and many other institutions contributing to the MP3 digitally recorded interviews featured in the course, it just wasn’t a resource I was going to pass up!

The course offers insights not only by those who work within parapsychology but also its critics, with contributors such as James Alcock, Stephen Braude, Donald West, Chris French, Dean Radin, and Deborah Delanoy. Every week we looked at a different aspect, such as the history of parapsychology, theories of psi and ESP, testing ESP and PK in the lab, and belief in the paranormal and testing psychic claimants.

The course comes with several specialist readings to download and message boards where students were allocated a topic to discuss. There are also optional informal self-assessment quizzes, which draw upon the set text for the course.

In addition, early on in my studies on paranormal belief, Caroline Watt herself kindly forwarded me a paper by Harvey J. Irwin, the other coauthor of the course textbook. She sent me a copy of a paper later published in the European Journal of Para­psychology, “The Measurement of Super­­stitiousness as a Component of Para­normal Belief: Some Critical Reflections.” It concluded with:

The construction of a psychometrically adequate index of superstitiousness as a component of paranormal belief would therefore be a challenging project but not a daunting one. Had I the funds, statistical resources, and youthful energy, I would happily undertake this work my­self, but now in semi-retirement I live in the hope that other researchers will take up the challenge.1

Reading books like Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach has also been quite encouraging in this regard; years ago she wrote an article on the late Robert L. Morris of the Uni­versity of Edinburgh’s telepathy work and mentioned how he had cooperated with the skeptic group CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, now the Com­mittee for Skep­tical Inquiry [CSI]).2 She talked with eager curiosity and even a certain amount of affection about her adventures investigating spiritualists and the Prince­ton Engineer­ing Anomalies Research (PEAR) labs, including a humorous account of testing Gary Schwartz’s claims. If Mary Roach can do it, then why can’t I?

One comment Roach made in her book has lingered with me: “The debunkers are probably right, but they’re no fun to visit a graveyard with.” So how much fun are parapsychologists anyway? Because I already knew that I enjoy the company of skeptics who investigate paranormal claims. Would parapsychologists be even more enjoyable? An even bigger question: would I discover evidence that would change my mind?

The course began with signing onto the University of Edinburgh’s WebCT, joining a class of twenty individuals from all over the world, including Australia, Quebec, Greece, Portugal, and Costa Rica. Split into teams of two, we brainstormed names for our groups (“Gorillas United,” “Robbie Williams’ Pants,” and “Pelicans Ahoy” did not, tragically, make the cut). My own group, “Pilot Minds,” settled into the weekly paper readings and MP3 downloads. Since I was traveling during the months that the course was run, it was very useful to load my iPod with the lectures and keep the PDFs on my laptop hard drive for reading on long flights.

The course set a timetable of assignments, for which each student was asked to write one blog entry (a brief statement of the student’s thoughts and opinions on a topic) in order to get a discussion going. Having run a skeptical blog, PodBlack Cat, for over a year, it seemed like a fairly straight-forward request. I was allocated a week that looked at the question “Are parapsychologists just jumping on the ‘weird physics’ bandwagon?”—a very challenging topic that required additional reading just to figure out what quantum physics involved in the first place! The blogs were posted on a standard forum board that was threaded so we could keep track of each other’s responses.

I was very fortunate to have the classmates I did; from the start it was obvious that we were a very mixed bunch. My class was comprised of magicians and psychics, keen psychology buffs, and those who were just plain curious about the course. I did notice that one participant in the other group had some rather passionate pro-ESP views that were accompanied by equally passionate over-application of punctuation marks, but overall the people were highly respectful, literate, and keen to click on links and references that defended views on each topic. I regret that the course concluded before I could fully respond to a fellow student who discussed what he saw as flaws in skeptical approaches to parapsychology and explained why he challenged the views of one of the course’s interviewees.

I was quite intrigued by an optional questionnaire posted at the beginning and conclusion of the course, which investigated our own beliefs about the paranormal. I mused openly on the course forum that it could be an interesting paper topic in itself, and I hope that it is considered in the future. By the conclusion of the course, I was probably not any more convinced about the existence of psi or ESP. However, since the course encouraged the terms advocates and counter-advocates to describe people defending their beliefs and disbeliefs, respectively, I feel I am more committed to seeing skepticism as a true “middle position” on claims of the paranormal. Mary Roach might very well have to change her conclusions to say that mixing skeptics and the believers can make for a very fascinating and challenging experience.

Jean-Michel Abrassart, a fellow podcaster and blogger at Scepticisme Scientifique who signed up in 2009 after hearing a report about the course on The Skeptic Zone podcast, had this to say about it:

The course is well-balanced between skeptics and proponents. As a fan of Chris French, Richard Wiseman, Susan Black­more, Ray Hyman, James Alcock or C.E.M. Hansel, I really enjoyed this “Intro­­duction to Parapsychology.” There is a huge gap between the parapsychological and the skeptic community: Dr. Watt’s course may be able to build some bridges between those. I just hope that skeptics who want to be able to speak about parapsychology in an informed manner will take it too.

The Web site for the course is hosted at www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk/
teachingOpenStudies.html, and the unit will be open again for students on April 12, 2010, and again in September 2010.

Caroline Watt was also kind enough to grant me an interview about the course, which should also air on the podcast The Skeptic Zone.

Caroline Watt: If you are interested in parapsychology, then there are some good reasons why you might be interested in the course. Firstly, because the course is online, there are no geographical limitations to participation; so long as you have a reliable Internet connection, you can join in. Sec­ond­ly, it is a non-accredited course, so no prior qualifications are required to join. This is wonderful for members of the public who want to expand their personal knowledge about parapsychology.

Perhaps most importantly, I think it is quite difficult to get reliable information about parapsychology; there’s a lot of nonsense written about this subject. But this course comes from a highly respected center for parapsychological research and is de­signed to provide a balanced picture of the field and to stimulate critical thinking about ostensibly paranormal experiences.

Kylie Sturgess: What struck me first about the course description was your own views on psi, where although you point out that research into psi should be taken seriously, you also say “parapsychologists do not yet have a good understanding of the factors associated with above-chance psi task performance.” What do you consider will help take study of psi to this next level?

Watt: The field has to be better organized. There are so few people doing parapsychology research, and there are lots of different research questions and methods being used. I think progress would be helped if researchers formed groups and worked systematically on a small number of areas that they agreed were most promising. Also, more funding would be a great help, since it would bring more researchers into the field.

Sturgess: One of the big questions that I had from the course was whether it was true that parapsychology is becoming “re-branded” as anomalistic psychology or if people were unaware that parapsychology issues and topics are cropping up in many different disciplines. Are people on the whole resistant to parapsychology as a science?

Watt: I see parapsychology as an interdisciplinary problem area, involving psychology, physics, and philosophy, amongst others. I think quite a few researchers use alternative terms such as anomalistic psychology because such terms are quite broad, encompassing both the psi hypothesis, as well as other possible explanations for paranormal experiences such as misjudgments of probability, etc.

Sturgess: What do you attribute to the “boom” in studying parapsychology in the U.K.?

Watt: Parapsychology has been studied in U.K. universities for years, and I think researchers have worked well to integrate themselves with their academic colleagues. In Edinburgh, at the Koestler Parapsy­chology Unit, literally dozens of students have obtained psychology PhDs focusing on parapsychological topics. Many of these have gone on to work in psychology departments elsewhere in the U.K., and because they received good training in methodology and critical thinking under the supervision of the former Koestler professor Robert Morris, they can make a useful academic contribution in their new posts, both in teaching and in research.

Sturgess: You mention in your FAQ (on the course Web site) that you have not personally experienced paranormal phenomena. How many people, in your experience, seek out serious study of parapsychology due to a personal experience?

Watt: I would say less than half. Many—like myself—are simply driven by intellectual curiosity and a desire to know what science has to say about people’s paranormal beliefs and experiences. Also, it is just plain interesting!

Sturgess: The interviews with a range of psychologists, parapsychologists, skeptical investigators, and scientists were a prominent feature and a highly informative aspect of the course. What was it like to get everyone’s input? And were there any hurdles? (I personally got a good laugh from the sound of a “tiger growling” turning out to be a coffee cup being placed down during one interview; technology can be a factor, I guess!)

Watt: Yes, that was one of my earlier in­terviews before I learned about the acoustic hazards of coffee cups! I am glad to say that every person I asked for an interview was most gracious and enthusiastic about participating. I really enjoyed speaking to such a diverse, informed, and interesting group of individuals, and from the feedback I got from students on the course, I was delighted to see how much they valued the interviews.

Sturgess: “Netiquette,” or behaving re­spectfully, can be difficult for anyone online; from my own experiences, I saw no upset reactions, but it is possible for an off-the-cuff participant remark like “people who haven’t experienced psi are liars” to be taken personally. With a subject like parapsychology, was it a challenge to provide discussion topics that would promote productive discussion rather than “flame wars”?

Watt: It probably depends a lot on the composition and dy­namics of each discussion group. So far I haven’t had any problems; students are well-advised be­forehand about ap­propriate behavior. Also, the discussion groups are moderated, and if anything unpleasant kicks off, the relevant posts would be removed and the group would be reminded about netiquette. If anyone persisted in misbehaving, I could prevent them from participation altogether. However, I think most individuals are smart enough to realize that lively but respectful discussion is to everyone’s benefit. There are so many interesting issues in parapsychology that it is really not difficult to find topics that stimulate discussion.

Sturgess: The course description explicitly said, “What the course will not teach you: how to be ‘psychic’; how to read minds; how to hunt for ghosts etc.,” yet one of the discussions within the course touched upon the way some people might contact parapsychologists because they may believe they have these abilities or be distressed about phenomena. What might skeptics not know about what parapsychology can offer to the community?

Watt: Most parapsychologists are not them­selves clinicians and therefore should not attempt to “treat” people who are seriously distressed about their ostensibly paranormal experiences. However, many parapsychology units are approached in this way by distressed members of the public and have formed links with suitably qualified colleagues, such as clinical psychologists, to whom distressed individuals can be referred. There is a growing field called clinical parapsychology, which focuses more on the clinical aspects of paranormal experiences. One issue is that individuals who are in the early stages of psychotic disorders may experience hallucinations or delusional beliefs and interpret these as paranormal experiences. These individuals may contact parapsychology units rather than clinicians in the first instance. Parapsychologists could help in the early detection of problems in these individuals. These issues are discussed further in the following article by my colleagues in the Koestler Unit: Coelho, Tierney, and Lamont. “Contacts by distressed individuals to U.K. parapsychology and anomalous ex­perience academic re­search units—a retrospective survey looking to the future.” European Journal of Para­psychology 23.1 (2008): 31–59.

Sturgess: Finally, does parapsychology need the skeptical? And vice versa? There was some discussion within the course about what constituted a helpful skeptical attitude and how skeptical parapsychologists really were on the whole.

Watt: Yes, skeptics are crucial to parapsychology, with one important caveat: they must be well-informed about the actual published research literature in parapsychology, both methodology and findings. Unin­formed skeptics are wasting their own and everyone else’s time. As to your second question, skepticism is wider than parapsychology, but for those skeptics focusing on the paranormal, I suppose they need parapsychology (narrowly defined as the field that attempts to use controlled scientific methods to test the psi hypothesis) to provide something to get their teeth into that is less easy to dismiss than everyday experiences that are often misinterpreted as being paranormal. However, I have a quibble about your question! It assumes that skeptics and parapsychologists are mutually exclusive groups. Some of the best and most detailed criticism of parapsychological re­search comes from parapsychologists themselves. If we are being good scientists, we should all be questioning and attempting to think critically whenever we tackle the paranormal. So in that sense, we should all be skeptics!

Notes

1. Irwin, H.J. 2007. The measurement of superstitiousness as a component of paranormal belief—some critical reflections. European Journal of Parapsychology, 22(2), 95-120.

2. Roach, M. 2005. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Text Publishing, Melbourne.

On the other, he rejected much ancient nonsense, advocated experimentation, developed the idea that chemical substances might have medical value (Gridlan 1997, 881; Chavallier 1996, 21–22), and famously ob­served that whether or not a poison is lethal de­pends on its dose (qtd. in Chevallier 1996, 22).

Although he adopted the name Para­cel­sus—apparently to suggest superiority to Cel­sus, the Roman medical writer—he was born Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohen­heim in 1493. He was known not only for his revolutionary ideas but also for his argumentative manner; some claim—wrongly—that the word bombastic was derived from his name (Hauck 2000, 99).1 An inveterate traveler, he settled into the role of town physician and university lecturer at Basel from 1526 to 1529, when he lost a lawsuit over a professional fee. He continued wandering throughout Europe, Asia Minor, and Africa until he was invited to Salzburg, Austria, by the prince-archbishop in 1541. However, Paracelsus died there on Sep­tember 24, 1541, at the age of forty-eight (Collier’s Encyclopedia, 1993; Para­celsus 2008).

There are those who say that Paracelsus continues to be a transitional figure of another kind: a spirit interacting with the living and even being sought for miraculous cures. On a trip to Europe in 2007, I visited two sites in Salzburg where these activities are reputed to continue, Salzburg Castle and the tomb of Paracelsus.

Salzburg Castle

Located on the river Salzach, Austria’s beautiful city of Salzburg is capital of the state of the same name, both taking their appellation from the salt—the so-called “white gold”—mined from mount Dürnberg. Salzburg was the birthplace of Mozart, and today it offers many sights including a baroque cathedral, a palace (Schloss Mira­bell) and gardens, and (as part of the latter) a poignant little dwarf park bearing statues of the wee people who once graced the royal court (Salzburg n.d.; Der Zwergl­garten 2007).

The castle, the Hohensalz­burg Fortress, overlooks—actually towers over—Salzburg from atop the Mönchsberg mountain. Built in 1077, the structure is accessible by a steep footpath or by the funicular (a cable-operated railway), and it offers impressive interior scenes to­gether with commanding views of the historic city. The fortress was so imposing that for a thousand years it was never at­tacked, although “when Napoleon stopped by, the city wisely surrendered” (Steves 2007).

According to paranormalist Dennis Will­iam Hauck in his book The Inter­national Direc­tory of Haunted Places (2000, 99):

Psychics say [Paracelsus’s] ghost roams the castle grounds search­ing for his many manuscripts that were taken from his room after his death and hidden away by the Prince Bishop. American tourist Deb Dupre was one of many to feel the presence of Paracelsus in the castle. Her en­counter during a visit in 1986 changed her life, causing her to become more unconventional and creative and open to the deeper symbolism of alchemy. She even started painting dramatic and colorful depictions of alchemical forces in her own life. Dupre also picked up paranormal energy in several photographs of the castle, including the spiraling mist that followed her around.

A copy of one such “ghost” photo is reproduced in Hauck (2000, 99). Unfortunately, science has not found such “spiraling mist” to be due to “paranormal energy.” Instead, much evidence shows it is simply the result of the camera’s flash rebounding from the wrist strap!

I did a pioneering study of this effect (Nickell 1996, 13–14) and have replicated it many times under controlled conditions. Depending on the nature of the strap (round or flat, braided, smooth, etc.), the orientation and closeness of the strap to the camera, as well as other factors including lighting conditions, a considerable variety of effects can be produced. Even so, other instances of camera-strap “ghosts” in Hauck (2000, 110, 120, 157) are recognizable. (The interested reader should compare an example in Hauck [2000, 110] with one of mine [Nickell 1996, 13] to see how similar the effects can be.)

Visiting Salzburg Castle with my colleague Martin Mahner, I sought out the site in question and snapped some experimental pho­to­graphs, one of which is shown in figure 1. (At the bottom of the white curve, the more mist-like blurring is due to the strap’s relatively far distance from the lens, an effect that occurs along the entire length of the analogous curved line in the tourist photo, showing that that section of the strap was the farthest from the lens when the flash went off.)

Except for the photo and that reference to what “psychics say,” Hauck offers no further proof that Paracelsus’s ghost, or any other, haunts the fortress grounds. Indeed we queried one castle shopkeeper who insisted that there was no ghostly lore—no specific story or generalized topic—that she was aware of; neither were there any reported ghostly experiences that had come to her attention. Virtually no one, she told us, asks about ghosts. Subsequently, at the castle’s museum shop, a young lady attendant echoed the first shopkeeper’s sentiments.

Of course, no one can prove there is not a ghost at the fortress, but fortunately no one has to. Rather, the burden of proof falls on claimants, and thus far they have utterly failed to meet the challenge.

Paracelsus’s Tomb

After searching for the ghost of Paracelsus at the castle, Martin and I visited the adept’s tomb at St. Sebastian’s church cemetery. We were there because of a statement by Hauck (2000, 99) regarding Paracelsus: “To this day, many ill and crippled people visit his gravesite hoping for a miraculous cure from the spirit of the greatest doctor of all time.” (Hauck’s specific source is unclear, since he supplies only a generalized bibliography.)

Located on a line of sight that runs due north from the castle, the cemetery is entered from the street Lizer Gasse and is at once a place that is quintessentially baroque and Italian—as well as one of quiet repose. Its centerpiece is the grave of Prince-Archbishop Wolf Dietrich (1587–1612). The cemetery also contains the Mozart family tomb (with the graves of the composer’s wife and father, Mozart himself being buried in Vienna), as well as the graves of other Salzburg notables.

Paracelsus’s grave niche in the church’s exterior, shown in figure 2, bears a bas-relief profile of him. It also includes a Latin inscription stating, “Here are the effigy and the bones of Philippus Theo­phrastus Para­celsus, who has won such fame in all the world through his Alchemy, until they are again clad in flesh. When this church was repaired in 1752 they were lifted from their mouldering grave and interred at this spot.”

Alas, while we were at the tomb, taking photographs and making notes, we watched in vain for the pathetic pilgrims who were expected to visit, hoping for magical healings. Only a curious tourist couple stopped briefly. Finally, I spied a young priest hurrying by, and I called out, “Excuse me, Father, do you speak English?”

“Some,” he answered.

I told him a book claimed that people came to Paracelsus’s tomb to be cured of their ailments, and I asked if this were in­deed so.

“I’ve never heard such a claim,” he told me. He did say that there was a group that made annual visits to the tomb, but he was unaware of any healing tradition at the site.

Even Hauck makes no mention of any actual healings being claimed at the site. If there are, their numbers would no doubt still pale in comparison to the French healing shrine, Lourdes. More than five million people visit Lourdes annually, yet only sixty-seven alleged “miracle cures” have been officially recognized since 1858 (D’Emilio 2008). Not only is that an abysmal record, but the claims at such healing shrines are invariably only examples of the logical fallacy arguing from ignorance (that is, drawing a conclusion from a lack of knowledge): “One does not know why the condition abated, so it must have been a miracle.” In fact, some “cures” are attributable to poor investigation, while others may simply represent misdiagnosis, psychosomatic conditions, prior medical treatment, the body’s own healing power, and other factors (Nickell 2007, 202–205).

Despite our disappointing search, Para­celsus does continue to be among us—not as a spirit plaguing our photos or providing miraculous healings but as a transitional figure in man’s gradual emergence from the shadowy underworld of ignorance and su­per­stition into the bright realm of science and reason.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to CFI/Germany for inviting me to Darmstadt for a conference, from whence the indefatigable Martin Mahner and I were able to launch a five-country investigative tour. As always, I am supremely indebted to John and Mary Frantz, who generously set up an investigative fund that makes such endeavors possible. I also want to thank, as ever, Tim Binga, director of CFI libraries, for his research assistance and other colleagues who continue to help in so many ways.

Note

1. Actually, his father’s name was Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim; bombast is an old word for cotton stuffing (Paracelsus 2008).

References