ISSN 0034-4125
72 papers in the library · 145 citations · publishing 1965-2026
Religious Studies April 14, 2023 R. Cross
Abstract This article offers some reflections on Christina Van Dyke's Hidden Wisdom, using the opportunity to make some suggestions as to possible lines of influence between the world of scholastic theology and that of the female medieval mystics in what Van Dyke considers their ‘annihilationist’ mode: that the goal of the spiritual life is transformation into God in some sense.
Religious Studies March 31, 2023 Thomas Williams
Abstract Given that the more apophatic strand of mysticism resonates more with the way contemporary philosophers are apt to think about mystical experience, the fact that apophatic mysticism was a bit of a fringe enterprise in the Middle Ages calls for explanation. The explanations that are suggested within the pages of Christina Van Dyke's A Hidden Wisdom are not typically...
Religious Studies March 15, 2023 Christa L. McKirland, E. Fuimaono
Abstract This article appreciatively reviews Joanna Leidenhag's work Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation while also responding critically to some aspects of Leidenhag's approach and content. The authors acknowledge several strengths of Leidenhag's work, then turn to how a panpsychic framework comports with Christa L. McKirland's recent work in theological...
Religious Studies February 27, 2023 Timothy Miller, T. Oord
Abstract Joanna Leidenhag has written a ground-breaking book arguing that the concept of panpsychism can solve several problems facing present-day humans. It can motivate greater commitment to concern for earth's diverse environments and the life forms that inhabit them. And it can solve theological problems connected with human consciousness, notably, how consciousness and matter coexist and...
Religious Studies February 10, 2023 F. Ellis
Abstract A discussion of the metaphysics of spiritual experience requires that we are clear about the nature of metaphysics, and I take as my starting point the ‘transcendent metaphysics’ described and supposedly eliminated by A. J. Ayer. Most analytic philosophers agree with Ayer (and Kant) that transcendent metaphysics in the relevant sense is deeply problematic, and they associate it with...
Religious Studies August 15, 2022 Aribiah David Attoe 18 citations
Abstract In much of the emerging literature in African philosophy on the question of life's meaning, little, if anything, has been said about the relationship between African conceptions of death and the question of life's meaning. Drawing from clues in the literature on African metaphysics/philosophy of religion, this article will argue that within the context of an African conception of...
Religious Studies November 3, 2021 Stephen Kearns 2 citations
Abstract I present an argument for God's existence based on the idea that the possibility of God requires the existence of God as a ground. After setting this argument out, I compare it to other arguments for God, concentrating on an argument from Descartes's Third Meditation. I then address various objections and conclude by setting out a non-theistic version of the argument.
Religious Studies September 1, 2020 Adam Green
Abstract: In this article, I use the extended mind literature to elucidate religious phenomena that are normally left well outside the purview of analytic philosophy of religion. I show that the extended mind literature casts light on how the potential relationships of the ordinary believer to extra-natural power dictate cross-culturally re-occurring ways of structuring religious praxis. This...
Religious Studies September 1, 2017 Christoph Jäger
Abstract: I discuss the role of religious experience in Richard Swinburne's probabilistic case for theism. Swinburne draws on his principle of credulity to argue that, if in addition to other evidence we consider that many people have theistic religious experiences, theism comes out as more probable than not. However, on many plausible probability assignments for the relevant non-experiential...
Religious Studies December 1, 2015 David Brown
Abstract: In this article three types of objection to a realist account of religious experience are explored: (1) the unusual character of its object; (2) its unusual accompanying conditions; and (3) the conflicting content. In response to (1) it is noted that despite divine freedom not all types of encounter preclude predictability, while parallels are drawn with perception of other complex...
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 October 23, 2009 Adam Green
Abstract Alston's perceptual account of mystical experience fails to show how it is that the sort of predicates that are used to describe God in these experiences could be derived from perception, even though the ascription of matched predicates in the natural order are not derived in the manner Alston has in mind. In contrast, if one looks to research on shared attention between individuals as...
Religious Studies September 1, 2006 Ulf Zackariasson
In this paper, William Alston's argument from religious experience in Perceiving God is characterized and assessed as an indirect analogy-argument. Such arguments, I propose, should establish two similarities between sense perception (SP) and religious experience (CMP): a structural and a functional. I argue that Alston neglects functional similarity, and that SP and CMP actually perform...
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 March 1, 1995 Dirk-Martin Grube
In this article, I argue that foundationalist reconstructions of religious experience lose on all counts: First, philosophical defences of foundationalism are untenable. Second, the theological benefits that can be reaped from foundationalism come at too high a price. I show that both William Alston's and Alvin Plantinga's foundationalism leads to sceptical conclusions. Third, I argue that the...
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 September 1, 1993 Matthew C. Bagger
Once we accept anyone's postulates he becomes our professor and our god: for his foundations he will grab territory so ample and so easy that, if he so wishes, he will drag us up to the clouds. Montaigne During the last fifteen years, the community of philosophers interested in religion has evinced a waxing concern with the justificatory value of religious experiences for theism. Two parallel...
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 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...