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The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Matthew Bradley (1929)

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  1. The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life.Maarten Boudry, Fabio Paglieri & Massimo Pigliucci - 2015 - Argumentation 29 (4):10.1007/s10503-015-9359-1.
    Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one (...)
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  • The immersive spatiotemporal hallucination model of dreaming.Jennifer M. Windt - 2010 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (2):295-316.
    The paper proposes a minimal definition of dreaming in terms of immersive spatiotemporal hallucination (ISTH) occurring in sleep or during sleep–wake transitions and under the assumption of reportability. I take these conditions to be both necessary and sufficient for dreaming to arise. While empirical research results may, in the future, allow for an extension of the concept of dreaming beyond sleep and possibly even independently of reportability, ISTH is part of any possible extension of this definition and thus is a (...)
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  • How To Hang A Door: Picking Hinges for Quasi-Fideism.Nicholas Smith - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (1):51-82.
    : In the epistemology of the late Wittgenstein, a central place is given to the notion of the hinge: an arational commitment that provides a foundation of some sort for the rest of our beliefs. Quasi-fideism is an approach to the epistemology of religion that argues that religious belief is on an epistemic par with other sorts of belief inasmuch as religious and non-religious beliefs all rely on hinges. I consider in this paper what it takes to find the appropriate (...)
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  • Why aren’t we all hutterites?Richard Sosis - 2003 - Human Nature 14 (2):91-127.
    In this paper I explore the psychology of ritual performance and present a simple graphical model that clarifies several issues in William Irons’s theory of religion as a “hard-to-fake” sign of commitment. Irons posits that religious behaviors or rituals serve as costly signals of an individual’s commitment to a religious group. Increased commitment among members of a religious group may facilitate intra-group cooperation, which is argued to be the primary adaptive benefit of religion. Here I propose a proximate explanation for (...)
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  • Medical humanities' challenge to medicine.Jane Macnaughton - 2011 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 17 (5):927-932.
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  • Divine Ineffability.Guy Bennett-Hunter - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (7):489-500.
    Though largely neglected by philosophers, the concept of ineffability is integral to the Christian mystical tradition, and has been part of almost every philosophical discussion of religious experience since the early twentieth century. After a brief introduction, this article surveys the most important discussions of divine ineffability, observing that the literature presents two mutually reinforcing obstacles to a coherent account of the concept, creating the impression that philosophical reflection on the subject had reached an impasse. The article goes on to (...)
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  • The fall of “augustinian adam”: Original fragility and supralapsarian purpose.John Schneider - 2012 - Zygon 47 (4):949-969.
    The essay is framed by conflict between Christianity and Darwinian science over the history of the world and the nature of human personhood. Evolutionary science narrates a long prehuman geological and biological history filled with vast amounts, kinds, and distributions of apparently random brutal and pointless suffering. It also strongly suggests that the first modern humans were morally primitive. This science seems to discredit Christianity's common meta-narrative of the Fall, understood as a story of Paradise Lost. The author contends that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Unchosen transformative experiences and the experience of agency.Jelena Markovic - 2021 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (3):1-17.
    Unchosen transformative experiences—transformative experiences that are imposed upon an agent by external circumstances—present a fundamental problem for agency: how does one act intentionally in circumstances that transform oneself as an agent, and that disrupt one’s core projects, cares, or goals? Drawing from William James’s analysis of conversion and Matthew Ratcliffe’s account of grief, I give a phenomenological analysis of transformative experiences as involving the restructuring of systems of practical meaning. On this analysis, an agent’s experience of the world is structured (...)
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  • Embodying Affect: Voice-hearing, Telepathy, Suggestion and Modelling the Non-conscious.Lisa Blackman - 2010 - Body and Society 16 (1):163-192.
    This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a turn (...)
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  • On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience.Douglas Hollan - 2012 - Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 40 (1):37-53.
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  • Debunking Arguments and the Genealogy of Religion and Morality.Kelby Mason - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (9):770-778.
    Debunking arguments are an important species of undermining argument, in which facts about the origins of a judgement are used to explain away that judgement. There is a long history of debunking arguments in the domains of moral judgement and religious belief, from the early Christian fathers to Sigmund Freud and beyond. Debunking arguments work by offering a truth-mooting genealogy of the judgement in question, where the truth of the judgement doesn’t play a role in generating the judgement, nor does (...)
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  • The Verifiability of Daoist Somatic Mystical Experience.Wen Chen & Xiaoxing Zhang - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    Mystical religious experiences typically purport to engage with the transcendent and often claim to involve encounters with spiritual entities or a detachment from the material world. Daoism diverges from this paradigm. This paper examines Daoist mystical experiences of bodily transformations and explores their epistemological implications. Specifically, we defend the justificatory power of Daoist somatic experiences against the disanalogy objection. The disanalogy objection posits that mystical experiences, in contrast to sense perceptions, are not socially verifiable and thereby lack prima facie epistemic (...)
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  • Person schemas: Evolutionary, individual developmental and social sources.Mardi J. Horowitz - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):309-310.
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  • Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Religion.Robert N. McCauley & Emma Cohen - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (9):779-792.
    Cognitive approaches to religious phenomena have attracted considerable interdisciplinary attention since their emergence a couple of decades ago. Proponents offer explanatory accounts of the content and transmission of religious thought and behavior in terms of underlying cognition. A central claim is that the cross‐cultural recurrence and historical persistence of religion is attributable to the cognitive naturalness of religious ideas, i.e., attributable to the readiness, the ease, and the speed with which human minds acquire and process popular religious representations. In this (...)
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  • Oppression and Victimization; Choice and Responsibility.Susan Wendell - 1990 - Hypatia 5 (3):15 - 46.
    This essay discusses a cluster of problems for feminist theory and practice which concern responsibility and choice under conditions of oppression. I characterize four major perspectives from which situations of oppression or victimization can be seen and questions about choice and responsibility answered: The Perspective of the Oppressor; The Perspective of the Victim; The Perspective of the Responsible Actor; and The Perspective of the Observer/Philosopher. I compare their strengths and weaknesses and discuss their compatibility.
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  • Rorty on religion and hope.Nicholas H. Smith - 2005 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 48 (1):76 – 98.
    The article considers how Richard Rorty's writings on religion dovetail with his views on the philosophical significance of hope. It begins with a reconstruction of the central features of Rorty's philosophy of religion, including its critique of theism and its attempt to rehabilitate religion within a pragmatist philosophical framework. It then presents some criticisms of Rorty's proposal. It is argued first that Rorty's "redescription" of the fulfilment of the religious impulse is so radical that it is hard to see what (...)
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  • Stance, feeling and phenomenology.Matthew Ratcliffe - 2011 - Synthese 178 (1):121-130.
    This paper addresses Bas van Fraassen’s claim that empiricism is a ‘stance’. I begin by distinguishing two different kinds of stance: an explicit epistemic policy and an implicit way of ‘finding oneself in a world’. At least some of van Fraassen’s claims, I suggest, refer to the latter. In explicating his ordinarily implicit ‘empirical stance’, he assumes the stance of the phenomenologist, describing the structure of his commitment to empiricism without committing to it in the process. This latter stance does (...)
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  • Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation: An Attentional Learning Theory of Spiritual Experience.T. M. Luhrmann & Rachel Morgain - 2012 - Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 40 (4):359-389.
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  • Entheogens, mysticism, and neuroscience.Ron Cole-Turner - 2014 - Zygon 49 (3):642-651.
    Entheogens or psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin are associated with mystical states of experience. Drug laws currently limit research, but important new work is under way at major biomedical research facilities showing that entheogens reliably occasion mystical experiences and thereby allow research into brain states during these experiences. Are drug-occasioned mystical experiences neurologically the same as more traditional mystical states? Are there phenomenological and theological differences? As this research goes forward and the public becomes more (...)
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  • How Long Has the Earth Existed? Persuasion and World‐Picture in Wittgenstein's On Certainty.Luigi Perissinotto - 2015 - Philosophical Investigations 39 (2):154-177.
    In some sections of On Certainty, Wittgenstein uses the term “persuasion,” pitting it, on the one hand, against “giving reasons”, and comparing it, on the other, to conversion, while, finally, defining it as “giving someone one's own picture of the world.” In this essay, I analyse these sections, in an effort to fit them into the broader context of On Certainty, and to clarify the meaning and the limits of the comparison between persuasion and conversion. My aim is to show (...)
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  • The epistemics of ayahuasca visions.Benny Shanon - 2010 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (2):263-280.
    In this paper, I discuss substance-induced visions and consider their epistemic status, meaning, and modes of proper interpretation. I focus on the visions induced by ayahuasca, a powerful psychoactive plant-made brew that has had a central status and role in the indigenous tribal cultures of the upper Amazonian region. The brew is especially famous for the visions seen with it. These are often coupled with personal psychological insights, mentations concerning topics of special significance to one, intellectual (notably, philosophical and metaphysical) (...)
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  • Methodological atheism, methodological agnosticism and religious experience.Douglas V. Porpora - 2006 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36 (1):57–75.
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  • Why bioethics cannot figure out what to do with race.Olivette R. Burton - 2007 - American Journal of Bioethics 7 (2):6 – 12.
    Race and religion are integral parts of bioethics. Harm and oppression, with the aim of social and political control, have been wrought in the name of religion against Blacks and people of color as embodied in the Ten Commandments, the Inquisition, and in the history of the Holy Crusades. Missionaries came armed with Judeo/Christian beliefs went to nations of people of color who had their own belief systems and forced change and caused untold harms because the indigenous belief systems were (...)
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  • (1 other version)The tightrope Walker.Severin Schroeder - 2007 - Ratio 20 (4):442-463.
    Contrary to a widespread interpretation, Wittgenstein did not regard credal statements as merely metaphorical expressions of an attitude towards life. He accepted that Christian faith involves belief in God's existence. At the same time he held that although as a hypothesis, God's existence is extremely implausible, Christian faith is not unreasonable. Is that a consistent view? According to Wittgenstein, religious faith should not be seen as a hypothesis, based on evidence, but as grounded in a proto‐religious attitude, a way of (...)
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  • The Concept of Argument: A Philosophical Foundation.Harald R. Wohlrapp - 2014 - Dordrecht NL: Springer.
    Arguing that our attachment to Aristotelian modes of discourse makes a revision of their conceptual foundations long overdue, the author proposes the consideration of unacknowledged factors that play a central role in argument itself. These are in particular the subjective imprint and the dynamics of argumentation. Their inclusion in a four-dimensional framework and the focus on thesis validity allow for a more realistic view of our discourse practice. Exhaustive analyses of fascinating historical and contemporary arguments are provided. These range from (...)
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  • God, Ontology and Management: A Philosophical Praxis.Margaret R. DiMarco Allen - 2019 - Philosophy of Management 18 (3):303-330.
    A philosophy of management that incorporates the big picture of human experience, all levels, and degrees of awareness in relationship with the world, will better develop and sustain an environment conducive to creative contributions that meet organizational goals. Quantum physics reveals the nature of reality to be connection and creativity engaged in a process of actualizing possibilities. Human beings participate in this process of actualization, as both observer-creator and experiencer of the universe through multiple domains of knowing – a collaborator (...)
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  • Transcendence, Consciousness and Order: Towards a Philosophical Spirituality of Organization in the Footsteps of Plato and Eric Voegelin.Tuomo Peltonen - 2019 - Philosophy of Management 18 (3):231-247.
    There is an evident lack of rigorous frameworks for making sense of the role and status of spirituality and religion in organizations and organizing, in particular from the perspective of spiritual philosophies of the social. This paper suggests that the philosophy of Plato and his modern follower, political theorist Eric Voegelin could offer a viable perspective for understanding organizational spirituality in its metaphysical, political and ethical contexts. Essential for such a philosophical reflection is the postulation of the transcendental realm as (...)
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  • Nietzsche Contra God: A battle within.Eva Cybulska - 2016 - Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 16 (1-2):1-12.
    Nietzsche’s name has become almost synonymous with militant atheism. Born into a pious Christian family, this son of a Lutheran pastor declared himself the Antichrist. But could this have been yet another of his masks of hardness? Nietzsche rarely revealed his innermost self in the published writings, and this can be gleaned mainly from his private letters and the accounts of friends. These sources bring to light the philosopher’s inner struggle with his own, deeply religious nature.Losing his father at a (...)
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  • Here and now: Discovering the sacred with entheogens.William A. Richards - 2014 - Zygon 49 (3):652-665.
    Renewed research with entheogens (psychedelic substances) has been able to facilitate the occurrence of mystical forms of consciousness in healthy volunteers with a high degree of reliability. This article explores the potential significance of this development for religious scholars, especially those interested in the study of mysticism. The definition of “mystical consciousness” employed in this research is presented and differentiated from visionary/archetypal and other types of alternative mental states. The ways in which entheogens may be employed with skill and maximum (...)
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  • (1 other version)Happiness Rich and Poor: Lessons From Philosophy and Literature.Ruth Cigman - 2014 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 48 (2):308-322.
    Happiness is a large idea. It looms enticingly before us when we are young, delivers verdicts on our lives when we are old, and seems to inform a responsible engagement with children. The question is raised: do we want this idea? I explore a distinction between rich and poor conceptions of happiness, suggesting that many sceptical arguments are directed against the latter. If happiness is to receive its teleological due, recognised in rather the way Aristotle saw it, as a final (...)
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  • By its fruits? Mystical and visionary states of consciousness occasioned by entheogens.Leonard Hummel - 2014 - Zygon 49 (3):685-695.
    A new era has emerged in research on entheogens largely due to clinical trials conducted at Johns Hopkins University and similar studies sponsored by the Council for Spiritual Practices. In these notes and queries, I reflect on implications of these developments for psychological studies of religion and on what this research may mean for Christian churches in the United States. I conclude that the aims and methods of this research fit well within Jamesian efforts of contemporary psychology of religion to (...)
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  • Using suggestion to model different types of automatic writing.E. Walsh, M. A. Mehta, D. A. Oakley, D. N. Guilmette, A. Gabay, P. W. Halligan & Q. Deeley - 2014 - Consciousness and Cognition 26:24-36.
    Our sense of self includes awareness of our thoughts and movements, and our control over them. This feeling can be altered or lost in neuropsychiatric disorders as well as in phenomena such as “automatic writing” whereby writing is attributed to an external source. Here, we employed suggestion in highly hypnotically suggestible participants to model various experiences of automatic writing during a sentence completion task. Results showed that the induction of hypnosis, without additional suggestion, was associated with a small but significant (...)
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  • Religion and pseudo-religion: an elusive boundary.Sami Pihlström - 2007 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (1):3-32.
    This paper examines the possibility of setting a boundary between religion and “pseudo-religion” (or superstition). Philosophers of religion inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas, in particular, insist that religious language-use can be neither legitimated nor criticized from the perspective of non-religious language-games. Thus, for example, the “theodicist” requirement that the existence of evil should be theoretically reconciled with theism can be argued to be pseudo-religious (superstitious). Another example discussed in the paper is the relation between religion and morality. The paper concludes (...)
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  • Secular Spirituality and the Hermeneutics of Ontological Gratitude.Richard J. Colledge - 2013 - Sophia 52 (1):27-43.
    In his 2010 article, ‘Secular Spirituality and the Logic of Giving Thanks’, John Bishop recalls a striking theme in a recent address by Richard Dawkins in which he appeared to enthusiastically endorse the appropriateness of a ‘naturalised spirituality’ that involved ‘existential gratitude’, and this led him to investigate the notion of a naturalised or secular spirituality with particular reference to Robert Solomon’s Spirituality for the Skeptic (2002). This essay looks to pick up on Bishop’s engagements with both Dawkins and Solomon, (...)
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  • The Philosopher as Pathogenic Agent, Patient, and Therapist: The Case of William James.Logi Gunnarsson - 2010 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 66:165-186.
    One way to understand philosophy as a form of therapy is this: it involves a philosopher who is trying to cure himself. He has been drawn into a certain philosophical frame of mind—the ‘disease’—and has thus infected himself with this illness. Now he is sick and trying to employ philosophy to cure himself. So philosophy is both: the ailment and the cure. And the philosopher is all three: pathogenic agent, patient, and therapist.
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  • Moral Recovery and Ethical Leadership.John G. Cullen - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 175 (3):485-497.
    Research on ethical leadership generally falls into two categories: one celebrates individual leaders and their ‘authentic’ personalities and virtuous stewardship of organizations; the other decries toxic leaders or individuals in positions of power who exhibit ‘dark’ personality traits or dubious morals. Somewhere between these extremes, leadership is ‘done’ by imperfect human beings who try to avoid violating their own ethical standards while at the same time navigating the realities of social and organizational life. This paper discusses the concept of ‘Moral (...)
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  • The Quest for Verticality: an Inquiry into the Infinite Nature of Self-Perfection.Prashant Kumar Singh - 2020 - Philosophy of Management 19 (4):387-408.
    If there is one question that has perplexed the best minds in every society, it is how to raise the individuals from their present state to a higher state of existence and perfection? The answers have been tried using different formulations in history: religious, scientific and political. The common factor in all these historical formulations was that they were designed in opposition to each other and therefore left many things unaccounted. The aim of this paper is to explore the idea (...)
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  • Effing the ineffable: existential mumblings at the limits of language.Wesley J. Wildman - 2018 - Albany: State University of New York Press.
    Ultimacy talk -- Dreaming -- Suffering -- Creating -- Ultimacy systems -- Slipping -- Balancing -- Eclipsing -- Ultimacy manifestations -- Loneliness -- Intensity -- Bliss.
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  • Psychology of Mystical Experience: Muḥammad and Siddhārtha.Abdulla Galadari - 2019 - Anthropology of Consciousness 30 (2):152-178.
    A comparison between Muḥammad and Siddhārtha’s psychological states is made to identify how they had their mystical experiences and how their presuppositions and personalities shaped their interpretation of these experiences. Muḥammad’s mystical experience appeared to be based on an altered state of consciousness. Siddhārtha’s teachings include that one must not have blind faith and remain open to various truths. These teachings may reflect that he was high in openness to experience, which may have fortified him from becoming delusional. While mystical (...)
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  • Raimond Gaita on Saints, Love and Human Preciousness.Christopher Hamilton - 2008 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (2):181-195.
    Raimond Gaita’s work in moral philosophy is unusual and important in focusing on the concept of sainthood. Drawing partly on the work of George Orwell, and partly on the life and work of Simone Weil, as well as on further material, I argue that Gaita’s use of this notion to help make sense of the concept of human preciousness is unconvincing, not least because he does not properly explore the figure and psychology of the saint in any detail. I relatedly (...)
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  • A case study of a meditation-induced altered state: increased overall gamma synchronization.Aviva Berkovich-Ohana - 2017 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (1):91-106.
    This study presents two case reports of altered states spontaneously occurring during meditation in two proficient practitioners. These states, known as fruition, are common within the Mahasi School of Theravada Buddhism, and are considered the culmination of contemplation-induced stages of consciousness. Here, electrophysiological measures of these experiences were measured, with the participant’s personal reports used to guide the neural analyzes. The preliminary results demonstrate an increase in global long-range gamma synchronization during the fruition states, compared to the background meditation. The (...)
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  • Uncertainty and God: A Jamesian pragmatist approach to uncertainty and ignorance in science and religion.Arthur Petersen - 2014 - Zygon 49 (4):808-828.
    This article picks up from William James's pragmatism and metaphysics of experience, as expressed in his “radical empiricism,” and further develops this Jamesian pragmatist approach to uncertainty and ignorance by connecting it to phenomenological thought. The Jamesian pragmatist approach avoids both a “crude naturalism” and an “absolutist rationalism,” and allows for identification of intimations of the sacred in both scientific and religious practices—which all, in their respective ways, try to make sense of a complex world. Analogous to religious practices, emotion (...)
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  • Feminists, Philosophers, and Mystics.Grace M. Jantzen - 1994 - Hypatia 9 (4):186-206.
    This article challenges the widely held view that mysticism is essentially characterized by intense, ineffable, subjective experiences. Instead, I show that mysticism has undergone a series of social constructions, which were never innocent of gendered struggles for power. When philosophers of religion and popular writers on mysticism ignore these gendered constructions, as they regularly do, they are in turn perpetuating a post-Jamesian understanding of mysticism which removes mysticism and women from involvement with political and social justice.
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  • Rorty, religion, and humanism.Serge Grigoriev - 2011 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 70 (3):187-201.
    This article offers a review of Richard Rorty’s attempts to come to terms with the role of religion in our public and intellectual life by tracing the key developments in his position, partially in response to the ubiquitous criticisms of his distinction between private and public projects. Since Rorty rejects the possibility of dismissing religion on purely epistemic grounds, he is determined to treat it, instead, as a matter of politics. My suggestion is that, in this respect, Rorty’s position is (...)
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  • What Is Ineffable?Jan Zwicky - 2012 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26 (2):197-217.
    In this essay, I argue, via a revision of Freud's notions of primary and secondary process, that experiences of resonant form lie at the root of many serious ineffability claims. I suggest further that Western European culture's resistance to the perception of resonant form underlies some of its present crises.
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  • Can religious experience provide justification for the belief in God? The debate in contemporary analytic philosophy.Kai-man Kwan - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 1 (6):640–661.
    In recent analytic philosophy of religion, one hotly debated topic is the veridicality of religious experience. In this paper, I briefly trace how the argument from religious experience comes into prominence in the twentieth century. This is due to the able defense of this argument by Richard Swinburne, William Alston, and Jerome Gellman among others. I explain the argument's intuitive force and why the stock objections to religious experience are not entirely convincing. I expound Swinburne's approach and his application of (...)
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  • The mystical stance: The experience of self‐loss and Daniel Dennett's “center of narrative gravity”.William Simpson - 2014 - Zygon 49 (2):458-475.
    For centuries, mystically inclined practitioners from various religious traditions have articulated anomalous and mystical experiences. One common aspect of these experiences is the feeling of the loss of the sense of self, referred to as “self-loss.” The occurrence of “self-loss” can be understood as the feeling of losing the subject/object distinction in one's phenomenal experience. In this article, the author attempts to incorporate these anomalous experiences into modern understandings of the mind and “self” from philosophy and psychology. Accounts of self-loss (...)
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  • Towards a Theory of Spiritual and Religious Experiences.Chris A. M. Hermans - 2015 - Archive for the Psychology of Religion 37 (2):141-167.
    How do we define religious experiences? And what would be the relationship with spiritual experiences? The author claims that the cognitive turn in science gives us new opportunities to map the territory of religion and spirituality. In line with other authors, he proposes a building block approach of cognitive mechanisms that can deal with questions regarding the specificity, origin, and complexity of religious experiences. Two concepts are presented that bridge the great divide which is presumed to exist between sciences that (...)
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  • Rereading the varieties of religious experience in transatlantic perspective.Ann Taves - 2009 - Zygon 44 (2):415-432.
    William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of the world's most popular attempts to meld science and religion. Academic reviews of the book were mixed in Europe and America, however, and prominent contemporaries, unsure whether it was science or theology, struggled to interpret it. James's reliance on an inherently ambiguous understanding of the subconscious as a means of bridging between religion and science accounts for some of the interpretive difficulties, but it does not explain why his overarching question (...)
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  • Mystical Anarchism.Simon Critchley - 2009 - Critical Horizons 10 (2):272-306.
    This essay explores the philosophical significance of the history of mystical anarchism for contemporary ethics and politics. It examines the complex relationship between religion and politics, and elaborates the thesis that many of our contemporary political concepts are secularized theological concepts. After a critical discussion of Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty and John Gray's critique of liberal humanism, it examines the anarchist practices of medieval mystics such as Marguerite Porete and the heresy of the Movement of the Free Spirit, and (...)
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