Debating Ghosts

Abstract

So far ghosts have been discussed as realities, since that is how most people in the past perceived them. Throughout history, though, there has always been debate as to whether they existed. There was a general assumption for much of the period that people really did see external apparitions of humans and animals, but as to whether they were the spirits of the dead was another matter. There were other explanations, both natural and supernatural, which, for religious or scientific reasons, were more or less acceptable to different sections of society at different periods. These questions and suggestions were usually debated as an aspect of broader, fundamental arguments about the fate of the soul, post-biblical providence, the reality of witchcraft and changing philosophical conceptions of the universe. Ghosts flitted through some of the most profound developments in intellectual thought over the last 500 years, and so to discover how they were conceived in the past is to understand how society itself changed.