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Superstition
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What is Superstition?

Superstition sits at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies, making it a compelling subject across a wide range of undergraduate courses. At its core, the topic asks how and why human beings form beliefs that persist without empirical support, and what those beliefs reveal about the relationship between reason and reality. Its academic interest lies partly in its universality — superstitious thinking appears across cultures and historical periods — and partly in the philosophical tension it creates between rational argument and lived experience. Courses in philosophy, sociology, and the humanities regularly prompt students to examine how belief systems are constructed and why certain ideas resist being removed even when challenged by evidence.

The papers archived under this topic take several recognizable approaches. Some are persuasive, building arguments for why superstitious belief should be taken seriously as a reflection of genuine human experience. Others are more analytical, using philosophical frameworks to probe the line between superstition and accepted cultural practice. A number of essays treat superstition as a case study in how past traditions shape present thinking, drawing on broader questions about how societies construct and maintain shared beliefs over time.

A strong essay on superstition begins with a clearly scoped thesis — arguing a specific position about belief, reality, or the social function of superstition rather than simply describing examples. Evidence drawn from philosophical reasoning, cultural analysis, or well-documented case studies carries the most weight. The most common pitfall is conflating description with argument: cataloguing superstitions without connecting them to a larger claim about why they matter or what they reveal about human thought.

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Paper Undergraduate

Marxian naturalism and the rejection of supernatural worldviews

Most Marxian's, in addition to seeing Marxianism as an emancipator social theory, have also seen it as a worldview. Moreover, they have attached considerable importance to it being a coherent and rationally sustainable worldview. As Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Rorty took philosophers to be doing, and legitimately so, Marxians as well want to see how things hang together in the broadest and most inclusive sense of that term. They want to establish, in doing this, that talk of a Spiritual or Supernatural World is nonsense, or at least a mistake, and, as Marx put it grandly, to establish "the truth of this world" (Rorty, 1976). Some of them were what we now call historicists (Gramsci most clearly), but none of them, not even Otto Neurath, were relativists, skeptics, or what some now call postmodernists, who think that there is no truth of this world, or of any world, to be established. They might, if they could have studied Quine and Davidson, and could have read their Putnam and Rorty, have come to be convinced that there is and can be no one uniquely true description of the world.

Research Paper Doctorate

Scientific revolution and the shift from religious to empirical knowledge

Enlightenment Thinkers: Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and Newton revolution in human thought took place during the period of history called The Enlightenment. The great weakness of the old paradigm, religion, lay in it…

Research Paper Doctorate

Science and religion: examining compatibility across philosophical texts

My philosophy over different philosophers/scientists

Paper Undergraduate

The Carolingian Renaissance and the revival of European intellectual culture

Carolingian Renaissance was a period occurring in the late 8th and 9th centuries characterized by a revival in an interest in intellectual and culture development. The leadership of Carolingian rulers, Charlemagne and…

Research Paper Doctorate

Amartya Sen's development as freedom and global inequality

Ethics and Morality -- Ethics and Development

Research Paper Doctorate

Enlightenment values and technology in Fahrenheit 451

Philosophy: Enlightenment and Fahrenheit 451

Hume's empiricist theory of knowledge and perception

In morals, politics, religion and science, Hume was a conservative empiricist who emphatically rejected all theories he thought of as metaphysical or not based on actual experience and sense perceptions. He did not regard religious and metaphysical theories as scientific, but more like idle speculation, superstition and prejudice. No ultimate original principles existed outside of the mind and perceptions, and this certainly included the concept of cause and effect, which he insisted was derived from the senses and later processed through the mind in the form of simple and complex ideas. Nothing could be known about human nature or any other subject outside of an exact, empirical science, while innate and a priori ideas did not exist. Even his theories of mathematics, logic and the color spectrum were all based on empiricism, and the ability of the mind to reflect, compile and make connections based on repeated sense experiences. In short, he had no use for all the complex system building of the Continental European philosophers, although his rigid empiricism risked carrying him over to the opposite extreme and reaching peculiar conclusions, such as doubts about whether physical or mathematical laws were actually operating independent of the observer.

Research Paper Doctorate

Mythology and sacrifice in Ginsberg's "Howl"

Allen Ginsberg's epic poem Howel, is not only a personal statement of society, but also a classic poem full of illusions to mythology and psychology. It is a history lesson of the 1950s and 1060s, an era of chaotic…

Thesis Doctorate

The iconoclast and iconodule controversy in early Christianity

In history, the Christian religion has developed along various path ways. Currently, there are many different denominations and ideals relating to Christianity. While the basic belief in Christ unifies Christianity,…

Essay Doctorate

Healing rituals and trauma recovery in post-war Sierra Leone

This paper starts from a microscopic view of one individual's experience and explodes that to describe struggles over the indigenous practice of healing and cleansing rituals that generate conflict in some of the largest states and international religions across the world. What Hawanatu Sessay describes helped her return from the most intense personal trauma to rejoin her community, shared by many, has been both suppressed by and incorporated into orthodox Islamic practice to form syncretic, hybridized popular cultures across the Muslim world. At the same time, such innovation encounters reaction from both the Islamic orthodoxy, as well as the states and institutions within which believers practice. This inquiry reveals both the diversity spanning Islamic practice across the Central Asiatic world, but also the commonality of traditions of extra-religious, shamanistic and localized ritual that often derives from pre-Islamic and diasporic origins, to amalgamate into indigenous Islamized hybrids that continue to evolve despite official oversight however that imposes itself.

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