The Materialist Orbit

A Critique of Jeffrey Kripal's Paranormal Apologia

De: David Christopher Lane

Narrado por: Jason Zenobia

Jeffrey Kripal’s latest book, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, extends his anti-materialist critique, which he codified in an opinion piece back in 2014 for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Kripal’s central thesis is that occasionally some events happen in our lives which cause us to “flip” or “reverse” our previous ways of thinking which he believes go beyond a reductionistic understanding of the mind. He even goes so far as to suggest that “matter may, in fact, be an expression of some kind of cosmic Mind [sic], which expresses itself as the material world through the abstract structures of mathematics and physics.” While Kripal’s book is quite accessible and highly readable, I find that the examples he cites to support his “trans-materialism” purview to be half-baked and lacking in the necessary attention to detail to make his argument persuasive. As I have argued in previous essays and books, what at first appears to be psychic inevitably turns out to be “less” paranormal the more contextual information we get about the particular incident, whether it be Mark Twain’s supposed precognitive dream about his brother Henry’s untimely death, or a wife’s intuition about her husband’s car accident early in the morning. Yet, Kripal seems resistant to more rationalist explanations and instead prematurely opts for the transcendent. This short book is a three-fold critique of Kripal's anti-materialist purview.

©2019 David Christopher Lane (P)2019 David Christopher Lane