Since its founding in 1971, the book series Religion and Reason has served as a leading forum for theoretical contributions on the phenomenon and study of religion. Topics addressed include category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. The series also periodically publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.
This essay argues that philosophical analysis of mysticism can avoid the two opposing positions of mystical essentialism and mystical relativism. The author contends that recognizing the context-dependent nature of all mystical experience is compatible with both experiential novelty and the occurrence of what Ninian Smart calls the experience of consciousness-purity. The work demonstrates that it is possible to formulate a methodology that steers between these extremes, suggesting that neither position is necessary for understanding mystical experiences.