Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
Ayon Maharaj
This chapter explores how Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical testimony and teachings enrich contemporary analytic debates about the epistemic value of mystical experience. These debates center on a key question: are we warranted in taking mystical experiences—either our own or those of others—to be veridical? After briefly delineating Sri Ramakrishna’s views on the scope of theological reason, Maharaj...
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
Jaime Kucinskas
This chapter traces the process through which contemplatives transformed Buddhist meditation into many contemplative subcultures to resonate with specific professional audiences in science, business, education, and the military. Contemplatives translated meditation into local vernacular languages, eliminated religious elements unlikely to resonate with targeted audiences, and adapted...
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
George Pattison
This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure...
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
Gerald Vision
Unlike brute ‘entities’, if conscious states (c-states) are brute, it will be a consequence of their primitive—viz., not admitting further elaboration—connection to their material base, what is commonly known as emergence. One might suppose the chief challenge to emergence comes from various materialist counter-proposals. However, given the distinctive character of c-states, a class of critics...
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
A. Milbank
Radcliffe’s Anglican orthodoxy is established in Chapter 4, along with her attempt through her fiction to offer a theology of mediation and participation. She works with Shaftesbury’s Platonic moral realism in contrast to Mrs Barbauld’s associationist view of taste and develops a mode of mystical ascent through the interplay of vertical and horizontal experiences. The sublime allows ascent...
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
Jaime Kucinskas
This chapter introduces the contemplative mindfulness movement, its successes in legitimizing and popularizing mindful meditation, and its shortcomings. This case demonstrates how elite movements can initiate widespread cultural change by combining elements of social movement mobilization, institutional entrepreneurship, field theory, and cultural diffusion. Investigating the contemplatives...
Oxford Scholarship Online
October 18, 2018
Richard Kenneth Atkins
Peirce first recognizes a science of phenomenology in 1902, but in 1904 he changes the name of the science to phaneroscopy. This change is motivated by a desire for terminological exactness. After rejecting “phenomena,” “pure experience,” and “idea” as appropriate words for the object of phenomenological investigation, Peirce settles on “phaneron.” He changes the suffix from “-logy” to “-scopy”...
Oxford Scholarship Online
October 18, 2018
Don Garrett
Chapter 14 (“Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza’s Naturalistic Theory of the Mind and Imagination”) argues that Spinoza identifies consciousness (conscientia) with power of thinking (cogitandi potentia). In his important article “Spinoza and Consciousness” (2008), Steven Nadler rejects this interpretation, proposing instead that consciousness for Spinoza is “a certain complexity in...
Oxford Scholarship Online
October 18, 2018
Richard Kenneth Atkins
No reasonable person would deny that the sound of a falling pin is less intense than the feeling of a hot poker pressed against the skin, or that the recollection of something seen decades earlier is less vivid than beholding it in the present. Yet John Locke is quick to dismiss a blind man’s report that the color scarlet is like the sound of a trumpet, and Thomas Nagel similarly avers that...
Oxford Scholarship Online
October 18, 2018
Susanna Schellenberg
Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
3 citations
The similarities between the experiences near death and drug experiences have often been stressed. This chapter goes a step further in providing evidence that the consumption of morphine, hashish, and especially more potent hallucinogens such as LSD in the 1960s and 1970s are to be identified as a major component, or “push factor,” of the emerging discourse on near-death. Not only were several...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
1 citation
This chapter focuses on a long-term development in Western societies addressed as “privatized death,” namely, the assignment of the dying into hospitals and other institutions. This trend, mirrored in the works of French historian Philippe Ariès and psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, so the chapter argues, served as a “push factor” for articulating near-death experiences. Near-death...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
1 citation
A second “push factor” for the increase of near-death experiences (and their reporting), emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, is the introduction of new reanimation techniques that increased the relative and absolute numbers of individuals surviving critical situations (such as heart attacks). In addition, the chapter discusses the impact of the broadly accepted new definition of death, namely,...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Michael N. Forster
Herder developed a very powerful and influential philosophy of mind. He was the source of Hegel’s famous threefold distinction between subjective, objective, and absolute mind (or Geist). Concerning the fundamental mind–body question he wavered between neutral monism and materialism, but developed a theory that has marked advantages over rival theories such as dualism, mind–brain identity, and...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
This book offers a modern genealogy of “near-death experiences,” outlining the important functions of these experiences in the religious field of Western modernity. Emerging as autobiographical narratives in the legacy of Christian deathbed visions, narratives of near-death experiences were used in Western religious metacultures (Christian, Esoteric, and Spiritualist–Occult) as substantial...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
This chapter outlines how the term “out-of-the-body experience” emerged in spiritualist and parapsychological literature. As is shown, “psychical researchers” such as Frederic W. Myers and William James made a significant contribution. The chapter also deals with the “filter” theory or “transmission” theory, i.e., the idea of the brain as a means for the inhibition of consciousness. This...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
The conclusion of the discursive history outlines that in contrast to studies that argue for a broad decline of Christian narratives of deathbed experiences in the early modern centuries, there is ample evidence of a continuous stream of Christian reports. These reports are, from the 18th century onward, seconded by a broad current of Spiritualist–Occult and Gnostic–Esoteric reports....
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
Building on earlier conceptions of “metacultures,” this chapter defines four metacultures that are important for Western near-death discourse: Christian, Gnostic–Esoteric, and the Spiritualist–Occult, being religious in outlook; the fourth, however, the Naturalist metaculture, is of a nonreligious nature. The three former metacultures assign religious meaning to the content of near-death...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
C. Ram-Prasad
This chapter follows the process by which a highly detailed account of the human being as bodily being emerges through a series of contemplative practices described in the fifth century by Buddhaghosa in The Path of Purification, a Theravada Buddhist manual. In the first three practices studied, meditation practices are described that disrupt intuitions about the stability of subject and...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
This final chapter secures the result of the survey by discussing the religious functions of near-death experiences for affected individuals, but also the functions of the reports for the audience. It outlines (a) ontological, (b) epistemic, (c) intersubjective, and (d) moral aspects. It has been argued that experiencers feel closer to God, are less attracted to religion, and are significantly...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
The three decades treated in this chapter can be summarized as a consolidation phase of near-death discourse, transmitted mainly in parapsychology, Theosophy, and Spiritualist–Occult circles. A newly emerging element in near-death visions is the “tunnel” experience. Finally, the chapter highlights the impact of Aldous Huxley—especially his psychedelic drug experiences in combination with his...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
This chapter presents how discourse on experiences near death unfolded from 1580 to 1900 in the three religious metacultures (and occasionally in Naturalist metaculture). It takes its departure with Michel de Montaigne’s experience near death. It is argued that this testimony is supposedly the first report in a modern, autobiographical setting. It moves on to early modern Christian accounts,...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
Raymond A. Moody had been introduced to experiences near death by George G. Ritchie. The latter had reported of an experience in which he had encountered Christ. This chapter discusses Moody’s first book of 1975, its motivation and motives, and compares Moody’s description of systematized “near-death experiences” with Johann C. Hampe’s systematic account of the same year, characteristic for the...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
The final chapter of the discursive history outlines how Robert Crookall’s and Robert A. Monroe’s books on “astral projection,” but also C. G. Jung and other researchers discussing paranormal and parapsychological phenomena in the 1960s and early 1970s, already assembled almost all phenomena that Moody could bundle in 1975 under the new term “near-death experiences.” However, the chapter points...
Oxford Scholarship Online
August 23, 2018
Gregory Shushan
Near-death experiences (NDEs) share many common elements worldwide, indicating that they originate in phenomena that are independent of culture. They also have many elements unique to the individual experiencers and their cultures, demonstrating a symbiotic relationship between experience and belief. There are numerous examples worldwide of religious beliefs originating in NDEs and other...