Mystical religious experiences usually claim to involve encounters with the transcendent or spiritual entities, but Daoism offers a different model. This paper examines Daoist mystical experiences focused on bodily transformations and their epistemological implications. The authors defend the justificatory power of these somatic experiences against the disanalogy objection, which argues that mystical experiences lack epistemic value because they are not socially verifiable like sense perceptions. They contend that some Daoist mystical bodily states, being essentially spatiotemporal, are exempt from this challenge, leading to a broader understanding of mysticism and a partial resolution to the objection.
Kant distinguishes between transcendental apperception and empirical apperception (inner sense), but sometimes writes that 'I think' expresses an 'indeterminate empirical inner intuition' (IEI) that differs from the intuition produced by inner sense, which threatens his conceptual framework. The paper analyzes relevant passages, evaluates major interpretations of IEI, revisits pure apperception, and proposes that IEI is a ubiquitous, nonfocal, 'obscure' empirical inner intuition built into all nonintrospective conscious states. This reading accounts for the peculiarities of IEI and resolves a major mystery in Kant's theory of self-consciousness.
Relationalism (naïve realism) holds that the phenomenal character of conscious perception is partly constituted by the perceived items themselves, not by representations of them. The austere version denies that perceiving involves representing; representation only occurs later through judgment. However, empirical evidence shows that unconscious perceptual judgment can precede conscious perception, and that perception can occur unconsciously. This challenges the austere view. The author argues for a revised austere relationalism based on the Purely Relational theory of perception, which accommodates the evidence and eliminates the need for the obscure concept of unanalysable conscious acquaintance.