Parapsychology is the study of certain anomalous phenomena and ostensible causal connections neither recognized nor clearly rejected by traditional science. Parapsychology’s principal areas of investigation are extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), and cases suggesting the survival of mental functioning following bodily death. The study of ESP has traditionally focused on two sorts of ostensible phenomena, telepathy (the apparent anomalous influence of one person’s mental states on those of another, commonly identified with apparent communication between two minds by extrasensory means) and clairvoyance (the apparent anomalous influence of a physical state of affairs on a person’s mental states, commonly identified with the supposed ability to perceive or know of objects or events not present to the senses). The forms of ESP may be viewed either as types of cognition (e.g., the anomalous knowledge of another person’s mental states) or as merely a form of anomalous causal influence (e.g., a distant burning house causing one to have – possibly incongruous – thoughts about fire). The study of PK covers the apparent ability to produce various physical effects independently of familiar or recognized intermediate sorts of causal links. These effects include the ostensible movement of remote objects materializations (the apparently instantaneous production of matter), apports (the apparently instantaneous relocation of an object), and (in laboratory experiments) statistically significant non-random behavior of normally random microscopic processes (such as radioactive decay). Survival research focuses on cases of ostensible reincarnation and mental mediumship (i.e., “channeling” of information from an apparently deceased communicator).Cases of ostensible precognition may be viewed as types of telepathy and clairvoyance, and suggest the causal influence of some state of affairs on an earlier event (an agent’s ostensible precognitive experience). However, those opposed to backward causation may interpret ostensible precognition either as a form of unconscious inference based on contemporaneous information acquired by ESP or else as a form of PK (possibly in conjunction with telepathic influence) by which the precognizer brings about the events apparently precognized.The data of parapsychology raise two particularly deep issues. The evidence suggesting survival poses a direct challenge to materialist theories of the mental. And the evidence for ESP and PK suggests the viability of a “magical” worldview associated usually with so-called primitive societies, according to which we have direct and intimate access to and influence on the thoughts and bodily states of others.