Religious Experience

Description

This Element looks at religious experience and the role it has played in philosophy of religion. It critically explores the history of the intertwined discourses on mysticism and religious experience, before turning to a few specific discussions within contemporary philosophy of religion. One debate concerns the question of perennialism vs. constructivism and whether there is a 'common core' to all religious or mystical experience independent of interpretation or socio-historical background. Another central discussion concerns the epistemology of purportedly theophanic experience and whether a perceptual model of religious experience can provide evidence or justification for theistic belief. The Element concludes with a discussion of how philosophy of religion can productively widen its treatment of religious experience in the service of creating a more inclusive and welcoming discipline. Cover Title page Copyright page Religious Experience Contents Prologue 1 Religious and Mystical Experience in Historical Context 1.1 A Brief Genealogy of the Discourse 1.2 The Experiential Turn: Schleiermacher, Otto, and James 1.2.1 Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834): Religion as Feeling 1.2.2 Rudolf Otto: Religion, Experience, and the Numinous 1.2.3 William James: An Empirical Approach 1.2.4 Schleiermacher, Otto, and James in Conversation 2 Experience, Interpretation, and the Question of Perennialism 2.1 Experience, Essentialism, and Perennialism 2.2 Constructivism and the Question of Interpretation 2.3 Perennialism and Constructivism in Comparison 2.4 A Way Through? 2.4.1 The Two-Realms View: Critical Realism and Religious Experience 2.4.2 The Building-Block Approach: Experiences Deemed Religious 2.4.3 The Social-Practical Model: A Holistic Approach 3 Religious Experience as Perception of God: Theistic Approaches 3.1 Theophanic Experiences as Vehicles for Individual Justification 3.2 Theophanic Experiences as Evidence in Arguments for Theism 4 Challenges to the Perceptual Model 4.1 Concerning God’s Perceptibility 4.2 Concerning Checkability Criteria 4.3 Competing Naturalist Claims 4.4 Competing Religious Claims 4.5 How Epistemically Valuable Are Religious Experiences Really? 5 Expanding Experience 5.1 Materially Mediated Religious Experience and the Expansion of Religious Epistemology 5.2 Rethinking Religious Experience 5.2.1 From Belief to Acceptance: Nondoxastic Religious Experience 5.2.2 From the Passive to the Active: Practice, Ritual, and Religious Experience 5.2.3 From the Spiritual Senses to the Bodily Senses: The Somatics of Religious Experience 5.2.4 From the Theistic to the Non(mono)theistic: Experiencing Things Other Than God 5.2.5 From the Positive to the Negative: Experiencing Evil and Absence 5.2.6 From the Individual and Episodic to the Social and Dynamic: Collective and Collected Experience 5.2.7 From Disagreement to Dialogue: Resonance, Dissonance, and the Promotion of Epistemic Justice 5.3 Concluding Thoughts: Experiencing the Discipline Differently References Acknowledgments