Introduction: is our task impossible or impolite? Part I. The Experimental Data: 1. Religious experience, 'East' and 'West' Some basic epistemological concepts Part II. The Challenge from Ineffability: 3. The outlines of ineffability ineffability relative to particular languages 5. Reasons in ineffability's favour Part III. The Social Science Challenge: 6. Nonepistemic explanation of belief 7....
The central thesis of the book is that experiential awareness of God-the of God, as I call it-can provide epistemic justification for certain kinds of beliefs about God. I call such beliefs 'M-beliefs' ('M' for manifestation), beliefs to the effect that God is doing something vis-a-vis the subject-strengthening, guiding, communicating a message, etc-or to the effect that God has some...
Both Gale and Pappas argue that I fail to justify the claim that mystical experience is perceptual. Hence, in Gale's terms, my project derailed before it leaves the station. However, the two criticisms are rather different. Gale's is the more radical, since he seeks to show that mystical experience is not even a candidate for being a source of justification for beliefs about any objective...