ABSTRACT
The third chapter turns to the early modern history of ideas to understand how the demarcation of modern scientific knowledge and of Enlightenment ideals of personal formation went hand in hand with a move to ban or exorcize the spirits from Western culture. The major turning point in the banning of the spirits lies in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant’s criticism of the Enlightenment visionary Emanuel Swedenborg. As Dreams preconfigured the main arguments of Kant’s critical works, it bears testimony of how modern epistemology both manifests and flows from the banishment of a spirit ontology. It will also be investigated how a racist politics of epistemology is at work in the Enlightenment project and how this relates to the modern Western account of spirit ontologies.
