Eliade on diplomatic service in London

It was in England that Mircea Eliade started writing the volume which would be published nearly a decade later as Traité d'histoire des religions (Patterns in Comparative Religion), as attested by the book's Avant-propos de l'auteur, dated ‘Oxford 1940/Paris 1948.’ Eliade also states in his autobiography (1988, p. 84) that ‘I read, took notes, and elaborated a plan of a vast synthesis of the morphology and history of religions, a synthesis I had glimpsed instantaneously in an air raid shelter during an alarm.’ In order to recreate the historical and political environment in which Eliade conceived and began to write his fundamental theoretical book, I have sketched the history of Great Britain's early involvement in World War II, the dramatic political events in Romania during Eliade's diplomatic service in London, and the British government's intrigues that held him a virtual ‘captive’ from September 1940 to February 19411     

Prologue: Encounters with Mircea Eliade and his legacy for the 21st century

To mark the centennial of Mircea Eliade, the articles in this special issue of Religion analyze various aspects of his life and his scholarship, and suggest what may be of value in Eliade's legacy for the study of religion in the 21st century. In my study, using one of Eliade's favorite terms, ‘the encounter,’ I suggest what my encounters with Eliade reveal about Eliade, his scholarship, and especially his legacy. By delineating and analyzing encounters that were remarkable, disturbing, complex, and contradictory, we may assess both strengths and weaknesses in Eliade's history and phenomenology of religion and what remains in Eliade's legacy that may be of value for the contemporary study of religion. Although Eliade's influence has certainly waned, my position is that there is much of value in his legacy, often in need of more critical reformulation, that offers a valuable critique of much of contemporary scholarship, provides valuable insights, and can serve as a catalyst allowing us to rethink our approaches to the study of religion.     

The diplomatic career of Mircea Eliade: A response to Adriana Berger

Adriana Berger has attacked Mircea Eliade's connection with the Romanian right-wing movement, the Iron Guard, or Legion of the Archangel Michael. Her article ‘Fascism and religion in Romania’, makes much of certain British Foreign Office documents which I have inspected in detail. Not only do these documents fail to corroborate Berger's conclusions but they cast real doubt on Berger's critical detachment. Her claim that Eliade was detained in England because of his political activities on behalf of the Iron Guard, and also of Nazi Germany, is without foundation. Other insinuations which she has made about Eliade's political motivations are subject to alternative interpretations. Eliade undoubtedly was vehemently nationalist in his youth and gave some support to the Legion of the Archangel Michael. However, we must constantly guard against permitting our pre-existent judgements of nationalism and fascism to dictate our reading of historical event. Even if justified, prejudice is still prejudice and is not acceptable scholarship.     

‘The Trojan horse of philosophia perennis’: Mircea Eliade's quest of spiritual transformation

This essay highlights one of Mircea Eliade's most important legacies to Religious Studies. The Romanian scholar never reduced the spiritual history of humankind to a mere socio-cultural construction. He defended his stance against the naturalist scholars and resisted the stream of ‘scientific atheism’ that is now towering above Religious Studies departments. The article also underlines Eliade's early intellectual influences and his idea of ‘creative hermeneutics’. I hope that this essay will contribute to a better understanding of Eliade's philosophical presuppositions.     

Rereading Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth, a story of suspicion and camouflage

The article argues that Mircea Eliade's 1976 novella Youth Without Youth (which has been recently turned into a film by Francis Ford Coppola) offers an intriguing literary illustration of the concept of ‘camouflage’ so prominent in Eliade's scholarly writings. Youth Without Youth, revolving around the paradoxes of aging and of (biological) time, develops as a fantastic reverie, a mysterious gnostic parable under the appearances of a work of science fiction, and ultimately becomes a sort of rebus, made up of a large number of suggested enigmas within enigmas. It is, at the same time, an opportunity for the author to revisit phantasmatically a dramatic period of his life – the year 1938. Historical reality becomes fantastic, charged with symbols and riddles. The Eliadean dialectic between the sacred and the profane is interestingly doubled in this story by a dialectic between spying and hiding, surveillance and escape, suspicion and camouflage.     

Inverse effectiveness, multisensory integration, and the bodily self: Some statistical considerations

A recent report in Consciousness and Cognition provided evidence from a study of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) that supports the multisensory principle of inverse effectiveness (PoIE). I describe two methods of assessing the principle of inverse effectiveness (‘a priori’ and ‘post-hoc’), and discuss how the post-hoc method is affected by the statistical artefact of ‘regression towards the mean’. I identify several cases where this artefact may have affected particular conclusions about the PoIE, and relate these to the historical origins of ‘regression towards the mean’. Although the conclusions of the recent report may not have been grossly affected, some of the inferential statistics were almost certainly biased by the methods used. I conclude that, unless such artefacts are fully dealt with in the future, and unless the statistical methods for assessing the PoIE evolve, strong evidence in support of the PoIE will remain lacking.     

The psychophysics of chasing: A case study in the perception of animacy

Psychologists have long been captivated by the perception of animacy – the fact that even simple moving shapes may appear to engage in animate, intentional, and goal-directed movements. Here we report several new types of studies of a particularly salient form of perceived animacy: chasing, in which one shape (the ‘wolf’) pursues another shape (‘the sheep’). We first demonstrate two new cues to perceived chasing – chasing subtlety (the degree to which the wolf deviates from perfectly ‘heat-seeking’ pursuit) and directionality (whether and how the shapes ‘face’ each other). We then use these cues to show how it is possible to assess the objective accuracy of such percepts, and to distinguish the immediate perception of chasing from those more subtle (but nevertheless real) types of ‘stalking’ that cannot be readily perceived. We also report several methodological advances. Previous studies of the perception of animacy have faced two major challenges: (a) it is difficult to measure perceived animacy with quantitative precision; and (b) task demands make it difficult to distinguish perception from higher-level inferences about animacy. We show how these challenges can be met, at least in our case study of perceived chasing, via tasks based on dynamic visual search (the Find-the-Chase task) and a new type of interactive display (the Don’t-Get-Caught! task).     

The Study of Religions in the Third Reich: A Report on Work in Progress

Translator's Note. Possible connections between the study of religions and European fascism, if not indeed Nazism, have sparked considerable discussion and debate in the English-speaking world. Consider the celebrated cases of Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil.By contrast, the work of German scholars of religion during the NS period has been relatively little studied. Still, there have been exceptions. Burkhard Gladigow of Tübingen has published ‘Naturwissenschaftliche Modellvorstellungen in der Religionswissenschaft in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen’.¹Recently, the study of religions during the Third Reich has become the subject of an ongoing seminar at Philipps-Universität Marburg. To date, one student has declared his intentions to write a thesis on the topic. Rainer Flasche, who convenes the seminar, has also worked on the topic extensively. The following essay is a preliminary indication of his results.Flasche, born in Hannover in 1942, studied theology, philosophy, German, and the history of religions in Marburg. He has taught history of religions there since 1971, making his habilitation in 1975. His best known work isDie Religionswissenschaft Joachim Wachs(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978).Readers may wish especially to note what emerges as the central principle of Nazi religio-historical hermeneutics: that only those who belong to a race (gender? class?) can understand it. Thus, only Germans can understand Germanic religion. The essay may also shed some light on the study of religions in Germany after the war. A reviewer of a recent book by Isaiah Berlin has noted how Berlin's lasting confidence in the liberal tradition perhaps derives from the usefulness of that tradition in Eastern Europe, where Berlin spent his formative years. In post-war Germany, the study of religions has emphasized a positivism that remains close to the sources and shuns explicit theorizing, an emphasis in which Flasche clearly concurs. The usefulness of this strategy should not be overlooked. It allowed German scholars of the NS period, but also later under communist rule in the Democratic Republic and to some extent within the confines of state-run theology programs in the Federal Republic, to work independently of and even oppose a sanctioned ideology. The strategy was not to champion competing theories but to oppose ideological claims with ‘facts’. This stance contrasts sharply with the theoretical richness that characterized German thought about religions before 1933, but—once burned, twice cautious.A note on terminology. The development of the nation-state took markedly different courses in the German and English speaking worlds. As a result, the wordVolkand the adjectivevölkischhave no entirely satisfactory English equivalents. The connotations of ‘nation’ are too limited, because the GermanVolkwas an ideal that transcended not only the principalities that dominated German political life from 1648 to 1866 but also the remnants of German glory that remained after World War I and even the extensive empire administered by Prussia from 1866 to 1918. Therefore, I have translatedVolkas ‘people’. But English ‘popular’ has quite a different sense fromVölkisch, so forvölkischI have used the adjective ‘national’ instead. Readers should keep in mind the direct verbal link between the two in the original.     

Recent Defenders of Eliade: A Critical Evaluation

Several defenders of Mircea Eliade have written books maintaining that Eliade's personal life and literary and scholarly contributions are all of one piece; that one cannot understand his scholarship without understanding his personal life, fears, ambitions, religious and other commitments. Reviewed and critically evaluated are Mac Linscott Ricketts's interpretation that the essence of Eliade's scholarship can be seen in his early Romanian experiences and writings; Carl Olson's interpretation that Eliade's scholarship is essentially theological and philosophical; and David Cave's interpretation that Eliade's scholarship is essentially based on his spiritual vision of a new humanism. Interpretations of Eliade's historical consciousness and his Christianity are criticized. Next, using these three defenders and several critics, the recent controversy about Eliade's politics and the political nature of his scholarship is considered. Finally, questions are raised as to whether Eliade's defenders have blurred or collapsed certain legitimate scholarly distinctions, thus rendering his scholarship even more vulnerable to attack.     

Intelligence, reaction time (RT) and a new ‘odd-man-out’ RT paradigm

A sample of adult Ss of reasonably normal intelligence were given an ‘IQ’ test, a series of RT tests using 0, 1, 2, 3 bits of information in a Hick paradigm and an RT task requiring choice of 1 of 3 lights as an ‘odd-man-out’ on the basis of its relative position. Negative correlations were found between both RT and measures of variation in RT and ‘IQ’ for both of the two tasks. Recent results showing no correlation between Hick slope and ‘IQ’ and no increase in correlation between ‘IQ’ and RT with increasing number of bits, are confirmed. An explanation for findings of Ss whose RT data do not conform to Hick's law is tested and found inadequate. The ‘odd-man-out’ task is found to show an effect of ‘learning’ across the period of the task, the size of the learning effect was found also to correlate with ‘IQ’, but no evidence for learning was found with the choice RT task.     

A critical examination of Michael Polanyi's conception of skills

In this paper I will consider some of the main issues in Michael Polanyi's discussion of ‘Skills’ from Chapter 4 of his book Personal Knowledge published in 1958.The concept of ‘skill’ features prominently in psychological theories of human performance in activities such as games, gymnastics, swimming and dance; such theories are often applied to other spheres of human activity in which issues about skill acquisition arise. It is not surprising to discover that skill theory is considered to be essential to the study of human movement and physical education. Physical education teachers in schools have consistently maintained that ‘skill acquisition’ is a major objective for the P.E. curriculum — see Kane 1974. Yet concepts such as ‘skill’, ‘ability’ and ‘know-how’ are constituent features of practical knowledge therefore the notion of ‘skill acquisition’ on its own will not do as a curriculum objective since all instances of skill and practical knowledge are specific to their contexts, namely, to different practical activities. If particular activities are valued in schools in the pursuit of children's learning and education it seems necessary to clarify the epistemological features of such activities in order to understand what it means to teach them and what it means for children to learn and know-how to perform them successfully. It is in these respects that the concept of ‘skill’ in different human activities should attract the interest of physical education students. In order to draw attention to major features of Polanyi's thesis on the nature of ‘skill’ I shall consider the relevance of his ideas about skill and knowledge in relation to human action theory. I suggest that misconceptions may arise in teaching and learning theories relating to ‘playing soccer’ if the basic underlying ideas about ‘skill’ in human activities are inconsistent with ideas about human action or, say, practical reasoning. It is this issue that is not, in my view, attended to by Polanyi in his discussion of ‘skill’. Thus, if my criticisms of Polanyi's ideas are shown to be valid it will be necessary, by implication that is, to exercise caution before any attempt is made to use his thesis as a basis from which to formulate ideas about teaching skills and skill acquisition. The extensive use I make of quotations from Polanyi's writings is necessary because it is towards Polanyi's use of language in his explanation of ‘skills’ that much of my criticism is directed. It is hoped that what follows may provide students of human movement and physical education with an insight into Polanyi's view of ‘skills’ in particular and to issues related to skill theory and human action in general.     

Special Relativity,Coexistence And Temporal Parts: A Reply To Gilmore

In two earlier works (Balashov, 2000a: Philosophical Studies 99, 129–166; 2000b: Philosophy of Science 67 (Suppl), S549–S562), I have argued that considerations based on special relativity and the notion of coexistence favor the perdurance view of persistence over its endurance rival. Cody Gilmore (2002: Philosophical Studies 109, 241–263) has subjected my argument to an insightful three fold critique. In the first part of this paper I respond briefly to Gilmore’s first two objections. I then grant his observation that anyone who can resist the first objection is liable to succumb to the third one. This, however, opens a way to other closely related relativistic arguments against endurantism that are immune to all three objections and, in addition, throw new light on a number of important issues in the ontology of persistence. I develop two such novel arguments in the second half of the paper.     

Changing One’s Mind on Moral Matters

Contemporary moral philosophy assumes an account of what it means to legitimately change one’s mind in ethics, and I wish to challenge this account by enlarging the category of the legitimate. I am just as eager to avoid illegitimate mind-changing brought on by deceit or brainwashing, but I claim that legitimacy should be defined in terms of transparency of method. A social reformer should not be embarrassed to admit that he acquired many beliefs about justice while reading Dickens. As such, appeals to the heart and the imagination are just as legitimate, within limits, as appeals to the mind; and showing can be as legitimate as telling. To demonstrate this, I consider the example of a vegetarian trying to ‘convert’ a carnivore. I then ask what it means when the carnivore claims to have been previously mistaken.     

How magic survived the disenchantment of the world

This article argues that the process described by Max Weber as the ‘disenchantment of the world’ is compatible with the continued vitality of ‘the occult’ in contemporary western culture. Focusing on the example of ‘hermetic’ magical traditions in western culture before and after the pivotal period of the Enlightenment, the article analyses the relation between continuity and change in the development of these traditions from three angles: their theories of magical efficacy, the nature of their practices and the ways in which magicians seek to legitimate magic to the wider society as well as to themselves. The discussion demonstrates that the transformation of magic under the impact of modernization and secularization resulted in the paradoxical phenomenon of a ‘disenchanted magic’. The article concludes by proposing a theory that explains why it is actually quite natural for magic to have survived the disenchantment of the world.     

Psychoticism, creativity and dichotic shadowing

Thirty Ss were presented with pairs of words simultaneously under the instruction to shadow one ear while ignoring the other (the Focused Attention condition) or to shadow one ear while attempting to remember the other (the Divided Attention condition). Ss also completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and two tests of creativity from the Wallach and Kogan battery. It was hypothesized that Ss high on EPQ Psychoticism and on creativity should make more shadowing errors of omission and intrusion. Creative Ss made significantly more errors of intrusion under the divided attention condition, but Ss scoring high on the Similarities subtest showed significantly fewer errors in the Focussed Attention condition. An ‘impulsivity’ interpretation of the data is tentatively advanced, and it is shown how this interpretation may explain a number of the anomalous findings in the psychoticism literature.     

Curriculum, Critical Common-Sensism, Scholasticism, and the Growth of Democratic Character

My paper concentrates on Peirce’s late essay, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” which identifies “critical common-sensism” and Scotistic realism as the two primary products of pragmaticism. I argue that the doctrines of Peirce’s critical common-sensism provide a host of commendable curricular objectives for democratic Bildung. The second half of my paper explores Peirce’s Scotistic realism. I argue that Peirce eventually returned to Aristotelian intuitions that led him to a more robust realism. I focus on the development of signs from the vague and indeterminate to the determinate and universal. The primary example will be the evolution of the very idea of number. I believe we will never arrive at the end of number history because we can never fully contain creativity. I draw similar conclusions for the idea of curriculum. Whether or not there is an end to the evolution of signs in Peirce is a matter of debate. I incline toward the opinion there is not, though I am unsure. I conclude by arguing that rationality itself is but the form and structure of poetic creation and that we should embrace paradox and even contradiction rather that become caught in totalizing and totalitarian end of history stories.