ISSN 0034-4125
72 papers in the library · 145 citations · publishing 1965-2026
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...
Religious Studies March 1, 1980 Kathleen Fischer
This comparison of some aspects of the treatment of religious experience in the writings of Bernard Lonergan and Alfred North Whitehead is intended to be a contribution to the continuing dialogue between process thought and classical theism, especially as the latter is represented in proponents of a newer or renewed Thomism. Continued exchange will hopefully be fruitful for the common theistic...
Religious Studies June 1, 1979 Vincent Brummer
In his paper Hampus Lyttkens tries to explore the relation between religious experience and the concept of transcendence. Lyttkens limits his enquiry to religious experience in the sense of ‘specific and extraordinary psychic experiences’ (such as visions, numinous experiences, etc.) which are interpreted as experiences of a transcendent God. By ‘transcendence’ Lyttkens means more than...
Religious Studies June 1, 1979
At one time there was a very close contact between British scholars, in the areas of philosophy and religion, and their counterparts in other European countries. Much of this has been lost in our time, and it has long been felt that the time has come to renew and extend these contacts. I therefore very much welcome the opportunity to publish the papers included in this section. At my request,...
Religious Studies June 1, 1979 Hampus Lyttkens
Someone may ask what the reasons are for putting religious experience and transcendence together. My answer is the following. My general philosophical position is empirical by nature. I am of the opinion that everything that is said about reality must in some way or other, in order to be true or probable, be related to or grounded in reality. If God is thought to be real in some sense of the...
Religious Studies December 1, 1978 Sallie B. King
The linguistic expression of religious experience is problematic for both the experiencer and the philospher. For instance: is the religious experience nonverbal, i.e. does it utterly transcend all words, concepts, and thought? Or is it ineffable – not amenable to verbal expression? In either case, what can one make of all the talk and writings of those who do report religious experiences? The...
Religious Studies June 1, 1978 James Kellenberger 10 citations
In recent years the issue of whether mysticism can be induced by drugs has been pursued by both scholars of mystical literature and psychological researchers. R. C. Zaehner is perhaps the best known among the scholars of religious literature who have addressed the issues of drug-induced mysticism. While on the side of empirical psychology investigators such as Walter N. Pahnke, R. E. L....
Religious Studies September 1, 1977 Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The fruit of several centuries of rationalistic thought in the West has been to reduce both the objective and the subjective poles of knowledge to a single level. In the same way that the Cogito of Descartes is based on reducing the knowing subject to a single mode of awareness, the external world which this ‘knowing self’ perceives is reduced to a spatio-temporal complex limited to a single...
Religious Studies December 1, 1976 Charles Cox, Jean W. Cox
Mysticism and the mystical experience seemingly play little or no part in our Western tradition. Certainly there is no mystical tradition in the West such as Zen Buddhism, nor is there any great understanding of or influence from the writings of Heraclitus, Spinoza, or the mystical passages in the early work of Wittgenstein. Mysticism has been generally misunderstood in the West, and it has...
Religious Studies September 1, 1976 Robert A. Oakes
The purpose of this paper is to clear up the long-standing veritable mountain of misinterpretation, perpetuated from critic to critic, concerning the admittedly problematic concept of self-authenticating (i.e. unmistakable) religious experience. While it may well be the case, as many have argued, that a sort of ‘experience’ about which one could not be mistaken is simply a logically impossible...
Religious Studies September 1, 1975 James R. Horne 1 citation
Since the late nineteenth century, studies of mysticism have presented us with two contrasting conclusions. The first is that mystics all over the world report basically the same experience, and the second is that there are great differences among the reports, and possibly among the experiences. On the positive side there are such works as Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, with its claim that...
Religious Studies September 1, 1975 D. G. Attfield
The purpose of this article is to make yet another attempt to defend and restate as convincingly as possible the argument for God's existence based on religious experience. In its simplest form the argument is an inference from the fact that men experience God to the conclusion that God exists. Experience is always experience of something, it is alleged, and if that something is of the kind to...
Religious Studies June 1, 1974 Keith E. Yandell
Appeal to experience for rational justification of religious belief is probably as old as the question whether religious belief has any rational support. The issues relevant to such appeal range widely, and I will have to be content to deal with only a few of them.
Religious Studies September 1, 1973 William J. Wainwright 14 citations
In this paper I propose to examine the cognitive status of mystical experience. There are, I think, (at least) three distinct but overlapping sorts of religious experience. (1) In the first place, there are two kinds of mystical experience. The extrovertive or nature mystic (in some sense) identifies himself with a world which is both transfigured and one. The introvertive mystic withdraws from...
Religious Studies March 1, 1971 Lawrence C. Becker
When philosophers speak of the inconclusiveness of arguments for the existence of God, they often do so as if they were talking about a matter of principle—as if it were in principle impossible to prove God's existence, that every proof was in principle inconclusive. Of course, rebutals of the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments are usually designed to show that these types of...
Religious Studies October 1, 1968 F. David Martin
William James catalogued an amazing diversity of religious experiences. Yet even the pluralistic James was able to find a nucleus, consisting of an uneasiness and its solution, ‘1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with...
Religious Studies April 1, 1966 R. J. Zwi Werblowsky
A considerable part of mystical literature deals with, or reports on, experiences that are of a cognitive and not merely of an emotive nature. Information is alleged to have been received not only from higher spheres but also about these higher spheres. Detailed, and at times highly complex, theories are put forward regarding the nature and evolution of the cosmos, the essence of man and his...
Religious Studies October 1, 1965 Ninian Smart 64 citations
Summary Professor R. C. Zaehner's distinction between panenhenic, monistic and theistic mysticism will be examined. It will be argued that there is no necessary reason to suppose that the latter two types involve different sorts of experience: the difference lies rather in the way the experience is interpreted. Likewise it will be argued that the Theravādin experience of nirvana, which is...