Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion
June 25, 2019
Judson B. Murray
Daoist mysticism is a subfield in academic areas of study including comparative mysticism, Chinese religions, and Daoist studies. Methodologies employed in it often adopt and adapt different definitions, categories, and theories formulated in contemporary Western scholarship on the subject of “mysticism” for the purpose of analyzing Daoist thinkers, texts, practices, and traditions throughout...
History of psychology
May 1, 2019
Simon Kemp
During the later Middle Ages, a number of religiously oriented people behaved in ways that we would consider unusual, yet it was unusual for them to be regarded as mentally disordered. This article reviews late medieval thinking and practice with regard to mental disorder and also with regard to the discernment of spirits, that is, how it could be decided whether an experience or impulse to do...
Mind Cure
March 28, 2019
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
This chapter explores the far-reaching influences in American religion and medicine of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and mystic, and Franz Anton Mesmer, who developed Mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. Swedenborg’s theology filtered into homeopathy and the religious movements of Shakerism, Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, Mormonism, modernist Buddhism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, and...
Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis
January 16, 2019
Carl-Martin Edsman
An evident experience of God's presence is the basis for all religion. Mysticism is considered to be piety in so far as primary importance is attached to inner religious experience, to religion as occurring in the soul. Mysticism is pure religious introversion. The special religious experience of mysticism, its epistemology and its ascetic ethics or technique, occur with startling likeness in...
Zygon
2019
Scientific interest in drug‐induced mystical experiences reemerged in the 1990s. This warrants reexamining the philosophical issues surrounding such studies: Do psychedelic drugs cause mystical experiences? Are drug‐induced experiences the same in nature as other mystical experiences? Does the fact that mystical experiences can be induced by drugs invalidate or validate mystical cognitive...
Philosophy Journal of the Higher School of Economics
December 30, 2018
M. Sekatskaya, Anton Kuznetsov
Ullin Place was an extraordinary person. From his early interest in mysticism he later turned to anthropology, which in turn brought him to logical behaviorism. While working on the improvement of logical behaviorism Place formulated the thesis of mind-brain identity, and has thereby founded the identity theory, which is still one of the most influential approaches in contemporary philosophy of...
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
December 21, 2018
Erika Martínez
In her article “Jewish Mysticism from Borges to Cirlot,” Erika Martínez discusses the form in which some Latin American and Spanish poets of the twentieth century have experimented, in a disruptive way, with the subjective possibilities of stillness and of time capable of overflowing. Foucault defended, in his last lectures, the construction of a new governmentality of self and of others. Among...
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy
December 7, 2018
Elaine P. Miller
Kristeva's Teresa My Love concerns the life and thought of a 16th century Spanish mystic, written in the form of a novel. Yet the theme of another kind of foreigner, equally exotic but this time threatening, pops up unexpectedly and disappears several times during the course of the novel. At the very beginning of the story, the 21st century narrator, psychoanalyst Sylvia Leclerque, encounters a...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
November 29, 2018
Amber L. Griffioen, Mohammad Sadegh Zahedi
In this chapter, we examine a few potential problems when inquiring into the ethics of medieval Christian and Islamic mystical traditions: First, there are terminological and methodological worries about defining mysticism and doing comparative philosophy in general. Second, assuming that the Divine represents the highest Good in such traditions, and given the apophaticism on the part of many...
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies
November 6, 2018
Celia E.T. Kourie
There is no doubt that we live in an interspiritual age, although this is not unequivocally accepted in all sectors of religious and non-religious discourse. However, although, in the past, theological debate was primary, there has now been a welcome shift to shared experience. Interspiritual engagement has as its aim a deep appreciation of, respect for and engagement with the spiritual...