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Scooby-Doo Gothic: Beyond Supernatural Explained

May 30, 2022

academia, Gothic, literature, superstition

Unless you’ve spent the last five decades on Mars, you must know Scooby-Doo – the fearless (cough, cough) cartoon dog chasing ghosts. Believe it or not, what we could refer to as Scooby-Doo Gothic goes back more than 200 years, to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

How, you might ask. What on earth could be the connection between one of the first texts of the Gothic canon and a cartoon show of the late 20th century?

The concept worth examining here – as you might have deducted from the title – is that of the supernatural explained; particularly, how it’s related to the supernatural accepted.

Briefly, there has been a long-standing tradition to divide Gothic texts into the one or the other category. We’ll take a closer look at both of them, and then I’ll explain why I think the differentiation itself is flawed.

In Scooby-Doo Gothic, there is a perfectly natural explanation for everything

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Superstitious People and the Meaning of Life

January 24, 2018

Philosophy

causality, ignorance, luck, meaning, perception, superstition

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The title (“Superstitious People and the Meaning of Life”) might come off as hopelessly pompous. Let me assure you that you will not find answers about the meaning of life in this article 😛

First of all, let’s start with the basics: what do we mean by superstitious people? And then we will have to deal with the crux of the matter: why are there superstitious people?

A superstitious person is one who perceives a connection that is non-causal between two events. In simpler terms, a superstition is the belief that event A causes event B, although there is no apparent link between them.

For example, an evident causal connection (a causal link, in other words) is that between accidentally dropping a glass of water, then seeing the floor wet and full of glass shards. Your dropping the glass (event A) has caused the state of the floor (event B). Sometimes a causal link can be more complex, such as in the linkage between thunder and rain. There can be thunder without rain, as there can be rain without thunder. But if there is thunder followed by rain, there is an obvious connection between the two events.

superstitious people — Me? Unlucky? Get outta here!

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