This chapter investigates Shelley’s fascination with issues of communication, especially his engagement with concepts of action at a distance, “the action of one object on another regardless of the presence or absence of an intervening medium” (Oxford English Dictionary). Shelley’s attempts to overcome distances of space and time were a feature of his correspondence, especially during his years in Italy. Action at a distance also informs his representation of a materialized physical universe in early works like Queen Mab (1813) and provides a foundation for his later accounts of political communication in The Mask of Anarchy (1819). I suggest that Shelley’s account of unmediated action at a distance coalesces with more recent treatments of matter and mediation in quantum physics and especially in Karen Barad’s account of material entanglements in which “matter [is] a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than a property of things.” Shelley’s poetry itself functions as a form of Baradian apparatus with the facility to offer “agential cuts,” providing moments of insight within intra-active material systems. In these poems, Shelley presents the universe as one continuous material system, which enables unmediated communication across any distance, and which at times of political crisis enables instantaneous solidarity and resistance.

This chapter examines the influence that Kuhn's involvement in the history of quantum mechanics project had on his career, and his relationship with historians of science.

Many have difficulties understanding what Kuhn meant when he spoke of “world change” due to revolutions. I reconstruct the historical path in which the idea emerged that reality is not something purely object-sided. The path starts with Copernicus’ new planetary system. The motions of the Sun and the planets, previously seen as purely object-sided, were now seen as containing genetically subject-sided contributions. A similar process, also at the center of the constitution of modern science, was the introduction of secondary qualities in the seventeenth century. In these historical processes, the reality status of something, whose reality seemed beyond doubt, changed dramatically. Philosophical reflection of such processes culminates in Kant’s critical philosophy. Ever since, this kind of “post-Copernican thinking” has been an indispensable part of the Western intellectual tradition, and it surfaced in the development of special relativity and quantum mechanics. I argue that Kuhn is continuing this tradition. Understanding this genealogy may make Kuhn’s metaphysics accessible to those realists who maintain that talk of genetically subject-sided contributions to reality is utterly inconsistent.

This chapter provides a sympathetic portrayal of Carl Jung, without glossing over his shortcomings and transgressions. It also explores the backgrounds, mindset, and aspirations of Jung and Freud that led to their attraction to each other, and ultimately their conflicts and the near-disastrous dissolution of their partnership. The chapter also covers the influences Otto Gross, Jung’s multi-year struggles with a near-psychotic state, his process of recovery, his exploration of various mystic traditions on the one hand, and the overlap between his thoughts and quantum physics on the other. It ends with a brief description of Jung’s influences on various new age and modern self-help movements. The chapter also discusses Jung’s complicated relationships with Sabina Spielrein, Toni Wolff, and his wife, Emma Jung, linking his attractions and attachments to major “anima” figures in his adult life with his lonely childhood, the deprivation of maternal attention, and his disappointments with a weak father.