The Verifiability of Daoist Somatic Mystical Experience
Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy May 27, 2025 Wen Qiang Chen, Xiaoxing Zhang 1 citation
Mystical religious experiences usually claim to involve encounters with the transcendent or spiritual entities, but Daoism offers a different model. This paper examines Daoist mystical experiences focused on bodily transformations and their epistemological implications. The authors defend the justificatory power of these somatic experiences against the disanalogy objection, which argues that mystical experiences lack epistemic value because they are not socially verifiable like sense perceptions. They contend that some Daoist mystical bodily states, being essentially spatiotemporal, are exempt from this challenge, leading to a broader understanding of mysticism and a partial resolution to the objection.