ISSN 0038-1527
12 papers in the library · 2 citations · publishing 2007-2026
Sophia August 5, 2026 Easa Saad
Abstract This paper examines the texture of desire in Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s ghazals and asks what it means for the object of this desire to not be an abstract ideal but a concrete spiritual exemplar, Shams al-Tabrīzī (d.1248CE). By exploring Rūmī’s eroticized depictions of Shams, the paper argues that Rūmī reconfigures the Persian ghazal’s conventional poetics of love into a mode of ethical and...
Sophia August 1, 2026 Fuyao Zhang
Abstract Contemporary fundamental physics and classical theistic metaphysics appear to exert opposing pressures on our conception of ultimate reality. Microphysical fundamentalism holds that the structure of the physical world is grounded in microphysical entities and their properties, whereas classical theism is committed to a single, unified ultimate ground that is explanatorily prior to all...
Sophia April 16, 2026 Milad Milani, Zolt Salontai
Abstract This article offers a comparative study of the religious epistemologies of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and Gregory Palamas, highlighting their shared resistance to the overintellectualization of theology through Greek philosophical categories. Both thinkers critique the limitations of Aristotelian and Platonic conceptions of knowledge, particularly their abstraction of the divine and the...
Sophia April 14, 2026 José Eduardo Porcher
Abstract This paper reexamines the ontology of the divine in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion whose cosmology and ritual life challenge the monotheistic assumptions that continue to shape philosophy of religion. Responding to what I call the legitimation trap —the strategy of securing intellectual respectability for African and Afro-diasporic traditions by assimilating them to Western...
Sophia October 31, 2025 Zahra Rashid
Abstract In my paper, I will explore the web of meanings constructed through the poetics of air and breath in a 16th century text Haqā’iq-i Hindī. My approach will view the Sufi-Bhakti interaction in early modern South Asia through lateral processes of knowledge formation, which found common ground in the emphasis on embodied rituals. This dialogue for both traditions shared a common grammar of...
Sophia August 26, 2025 Ståle Gundersen
Conscious states are characterized by their phenomenal feel; it is like something to experience pain, see the color red, or hear a particular sound. The version of the argument from consciousness that will be discussed in the present paper states that only theism, the postulation of a transcendent God, can explain why consciousness exists in the universe. The argument from consciousness thus...
Sophia March 1, 2025 Erik Kuravsky 1 citation
Abstract The essay offers an interpretation of psychedelic peak experiences. It criticizes the quasi-scientific naturalistic attempts to explain such experiences and offers an alternative ontology underlying a more complex sense of naturalism, thus defending an entheogenic view irreducible to mere psychological effects. First, the mainstream ontology in the paradigm of natural sciences is...
Sophia October 19, 2023 Steve Taylor
This paper argues for a ‘perennial phenomenology’ (or ‘soft’ perennialism) varying from the traditionalist notion of a ‘perennial philosophy.’ Perennial phenomenology offers a more nuanced form of perennialism that focuses on spiritual/mystical experiences rather than the teachings and beliefs of different religions. While teachings and beliefs vary greatly, the mystical experiences associated...
Sophia March 1, 2022 Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir 1 citation
In her book To be Born (2017), Luce Irigaray offers a novel philosophy of the child. Instead of viewing the child as a bearer of rights and in need of adequate care as is common in contemporary philosophies of childhood, Irigaray presents the child as a metaphor of a new human being which represents natural belonging. The rearticulation of the human has been ongoing in Irigaray’s philosophy...
Sophia January 14, 2021 Daniel H. Spencer
Abstract In this article, I discuss the relevance of the study of mysticism for Christian analytic theologians and philosophers of religion. I begin with a brief consideration of some reasons Christian academics might be reluctant to enter this field, and indicate that, somewhat surprisingly, the study of mysticism is something but seldom addressed in Christian analytic circles. With this...
Sophia April 1, 2012 Bruce R. Reichenbach
William Alston proposed an understanding of religious experience modeled after the triadic structure of sense perception. However, a perceptual model falters because of the unobservability of God as the object of religious experience. To reshape Alston’s model of religious experience as an observational practice we utilize Dudley Shapere’s distinction between the philosophical use of ‘observe’...
Sophia July 1, 2007 Patrick Laude
This paper highlights the contributions of three major Islamicists, Louis Massignon, Henry Corbin, and Frithjof Schuon, to the understanding of the Qur’ân. Their works point to the epistemologic primacy of the contemplative and esoteric dimensions of the Book. Its linguistic texture and modalities are here understood as expressing the very limits of language, the proportional reciprocity...