Religious Studies
July 31, 2026
S Siddharth
Abstract Recent years have seen increased interest in panpsychism as a metaphysics of consciousness, as well as a burgeoning cross-cultural dialogue between analytic philosophy of mind and classical Indian traditions regarding panpsychism. While Advaita Vedānta has been the school that has received the most attention in this regard, Advaita’s foremost opponents within the Vedāntic umbrella –...
Religious Studies
July 7, 2026
John Alton Christmann
Abstract Helen Yetter-Chappell defends a nontheistic idealism on which physical reality is a phenomenal tapestry constituted by unity-of-consciousness relations, requiring no divine perceiver. This paper argues that her position cannot sustain anti-subjectivism without admitting a globally unifying subject-like ground. Two arguments establish the pressure: the instability of the Thin Mind view...
Religious Studies
June 29, 2026
R. Krishnaswamy, Tarinee Awasthi
Abstract Śrīvidyā is a Tantric tradition which includes a form of religious initiation into an esoteric practice. Descriptions of initiation allude to and often describe the initiator sharing an experience with the initiand. In this article, we will suggest that such experiences can be understood in terms of a ‘shared token experience’. To make a case for taking such an experience into account,...
Religious Studies
May 14, 2026
Ricardo Sousa Silvestre
Abstract This paper explores the implications of Jīva Gosvāmī’s (sixteenth century) Bhedābheda Vedānta for the contemporary philosophical debate on consciousness, thereby contributing to the broader and growing interest in the insights that Indian traditions may bring to current discussions in the philosophy of mind. More specifically, I develop here a metaphysical, coarse-grained partial...
Religious Studies
December 9, 2025
Daekyung Jung
Abstract This article critically re-examines the long-standing dominance of constructivism in debates concerning the epistemic reliability of religious experience. It argues that the epistemic reliability of such experiences can be more supported not through a strictly cognitivistic framework, but rather through an embodied approach. By interpreting religious experience from the perspective of...
Religious Studies
October 30, 2025
Brant Cole Entrekin
Abstract This paper argues that interactions with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, such as ChatGPT, can mediate genuine mystical experiences. Building off the framework of mystical experiences developed by William James, I argue that interactions with AI chatbots can mediate mystical experiences in a structurally comparable way to how guided meditation can produce mystical experiences. I...
Religious Studies
September 1, 2024
Mark Wynn
AbstractOne way of understanding the significance of Christina Van Dyke's book A Hidden Wisdom is as a plea for the recovery of an ideal of philosophy as, in part, ‘a way of life’, and for a reintegration of that ideal into current philosophical practice. In this review, I consider how this proposal might be developed.
Religious Studies
May 1, 2024
Karen O'Brien-Kop
AbstractThis article addresses the theme of ‘death and immortality’ from the perspective of consciousness, and takes as its starting point a root text of Hindu philosophy, the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. fourth century ce). The text posits a dualist ontology in which consciousness is separate and autonomous from a material reality that includes body and mind. The goal is to be...
Religious Studies
January 30, 2024
Mikel Burley
1 citation
Abstract When the anthropologist R. R. Marett affirmed that certain forms of religion are ‘not so much thought out as danced out’ (1914, xxxi), he was, in effect, anticipating a criticism that has been levelled at philosophy of religion in recent decades – namely, the criticism that this branch of philosophy has frequently underplayed the extent to which religions often prioritize ritual...
Religious Studies
July 18, 2011
Stephen S. Bush
15 citations
Abstract The constructivist position, that mystical experiences are determined by the experiencer's cultural context, is now more prevalent among scholars of religion than the perennialist position, which maintains that mystical experiences have a common core that is cross-culturally universal. In large part, this is due to the efforts of Wayne Proudfoot in his widely accepted book,Religious...
Religious Studies
September 1, 2003
Matthew Ratcliffe
In this paper, I consider V. S. Ramachandran's in-principle agnosticism concerning whether neurological studies of religious experience can be taken as support for the claim that God really does communicate with people during religious experiences. Contra Ramachandran, I argue that it is by no means obvious that agnosticism is the proper scientific attitude to adopt in relation to this claim. I...
Religious Studies
December 1, 2000
S. Mark Heim
Conflict in the testimony of religious experiences appears to seriously undercut its evidential value. Arguments that make positive appeal to the evidence of religious experience usually deal with this objection by denying evidential value to the particularistic elements in such experience as descriptive of an ultimate religious reality and an ultimate human end. Using the work of Jerome...
Religious Studies
December 1, 1994
Melissa Raphael
This article brings together constructivist epistemology and feminist study of religion to provide phenomenological evidence that numinous consciousness is not the immediate,sui generisessence of religious experience that Rudolf Otto believed it to be. Whilst there are certain peculiarities in the Ottonian scheme that might make numinous consciousness unusually resistant to conceptual and...
Religious Studies
June 1, 1994
L. Philip Barnes
13 citations
In a recent study entitled ‘Numinous Experience and Religious Language’, Dr Leon Schlamm has endorsed Rudolf Otto's well known and much discussed account of the relationship of religious experience to religious language, and then used this position to criticize some highly influential voices in the continuing debate on the precise nature of mystical experience. The aim of this paper, in...
Religious Studies
June 1, 1994
James W. Forgie
3 citations
In his long-awaited Mystic Union, Nelson Pike offers a phenomenology of mysticism. His account is based on the reports and descriptions of third parties, not on his own, first-person experience. So he calls his enterprise ‘phenomenography’, an attempt to describe the experiential content of conscious states by way of reports of them. Pike finds in the Christian mystical tradition three...
Religious Studies
June 1, 1994
J. L. Schellenberg
William Alston's Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) is a most significant contribution to the philosophy of religion. The product of 50 years' reflection on its topic (xi), this work provides a very thorough explication and defence of what Alston calls the ‘mystical perceptual practice’ (MP) – the practice of forming beliefs...
Religious Studies
December 1, 1992
Leon Schlamm
The purpose of this article is to evaluate Rudolf Otto's account of the relationship between numinous experience and religious language inThe Idea of the Holy, and this will inevitably also involve some more general discussion of the relationship between all religious experience and discursive reason. InThe Idea of the HolyOtto makes a number of controversial claims about the nature of numinous...
Religious Studies
September 1, 1991
Leon Schlamm
Rudolf Otto has often been criticized for not showing enough interest in mystical experience. In this article I want to demonstrate how misplaced this criticism is and to show that it is based on an erroneous interpretation of the relationship between numinous and mystical experience in his work by most of his students. I shall argue that, particularly inThe Idea of the Holy, Otto offers an...
Religious Studies
September 1, 1989
Michael P. Levine
Two theses are central to foundationalism. First, the foundationalist claims that there is a class of propositions, a class of empirical contingent beliefs, that are ‘immediately justified’. Alternatively, one can describe these beliefs as ‘self–evident’, ‘non–inferentially justified’, or ‘self–warranted’, though these are not always regarded as entailing one another. The justification or...
Religious Studies
September 1, 1989
David Sanderlin
It is often said that Christian mystics and contemplatives deemphasize reason, especially during advanced stages of spiritual growth such as union with God. St John of the Cross insists that to be united with God in this life through faith, we must empty our intellect of all comprehensions of God in a dark night of unknowing. According to Zwi Werblowsky, John's teaching on faith means the...
Religious Studies
March 1, 1988
Michael McGhee
I have meditated regularly, following simple Buddhist procedures, for more than ten years, and that seems just about long enough for me to start to offer some preliminary account of it, despite the limitations of my progress and experience, and the difficulty of describing the more intimate and less explored reaches of the mind. I think I have learned enough to say that through prolonged...
Religious Studies
March 1, 1986
Michael Martin
In The Existence of God Richard Swinburne argues that certain religious experiences support the hypothesis that God exists. Indeed, the argument from religious experience is of crucial importance in Swinburne's philosophical theology. For, according to Swinburne, without the argument from religious experience the combined weight of the other arguments he considers, e.g. the teleological, the...
Religious Studies
June 1, 1985
J. William Forgie
Much work on mystical experience has taken for granted a certain view about the relation between experience and its interpretation. This ‘traditional view’ has received perhaps its most explicit statement in Stace's Mysticism and Philosophy. It is a view which is attractive to proponents of the doctrine of unanimity, the doctrine (roughly put) that at the phenomenological level all mystical...
Religious Studies
December 1, 1981
W. Norris Clarke
This paper is devoted to the task of exploring just what there is in man's nature which makes it possible for him to be open to religious experience, to be positively disposed to receive it. By ‘natural’ here I mean only that which all men are in fact endowed with when they enter this present world of human history before they enter into any particular religious context. Hence I am not going to...
Religious Studies
March 1, 1981
William C. Chittick
To say ‘mysticism versus philosophy’ in the context of Islamic civilization means something far different from what it has come to signify in the West, where many philosophers have looked upon mysticism as the abandonment of any attempt to reconcile religious data with intelligent thought. Certainly the Muslim mystics and philosophers sometimes display a certain mutual opposition and...