ABSTRACT
The last 150 years have seen several Western thinkers making an attempt to reintroduce spirit terminology. I will discuss three of them: William James, Carl-Gustav Jung and Jacques Derrida, who took rather different approaches. The aim of this discussion is to show that (a) the spiritual obviously returns whenever it is conjured away from the realm of valid knowledge, and (b) that there are different possible approaches to opening up Western thought to such a return. The differences between the three – pragmatist ontology, psychology of the collective subconscious and deconstruction – will be investigated for their respective benefits to our aim to open up philosophy to spiritual beings, especially those who talk to us of a potentially different way to be in nature, the animal spirits.
