William James's later work on mystic emotion, often seen as a break from his early emotion theory, actually extends it. Rather than abandoning his earlier definition of emotions as 'feelings of bodily changes', James applies that embodied approach to positive feelings like inspiration and joy as well as to melancholy and depression, showing how these feeling states give meaning to life. This anticipates later phenomenological accounts of how moods like anxiety open possibilities for philosophical reflection and self-understanding. The paper argues, following Ratcliffe, that there is no sharp gap between James's early and late work.
The long-standing objection that Cartesian mental causation violates conservation of energy and momentum is flawed because conservation laws have neglected features. Conservation is local, holding for each volume separately based on boundary flows, and global conservation requires convergent summing that likely fails in reality. Energy conservation depends on temporal symmetry of laws; if nonphysical influence breaks symmetry at certain times and places, conservation fails there while holding elsewhere. Noether's converse theorem shows conservation implies causal closure of the physical, so expecting conservation in the brain assumes Cartesianism false. Thus Leibniz's objection begs the question. General Relativity, far from offering a loophole, makes mental causation harder.
The author introduces the topic of ineffability and summarizes the book Ineffability and Religious Experience, then responds to articles by Thaddeus Metz and David E. Cooper. The article concludes with remarks on the future of philosophy of religion, considering recent philosophical work on ineffability.