The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion

metaphor, analogy, and symbols. This is not a peculiar mark of mysticism, however, since quite common in science, philosophy, an ...

used systematically to make logically respectable claims. While mystics use much literal language in describing experiences (Als ...

subject and the object of the experience. Zaehner thought that theistic experience was an advance over the monistic, since the l ...

meant only to enable the mystic to contemplate the unified supernal structure of the divine sefirot. And the Zen master Dogen wr ...

literature shows that typical mystical experiences are conceptual in nature and not empty of concepts. (4) An epistemological ob ...

cognitive mechanism sufficient for knowing one had had a PCE. If we stick to an evidentialist conception of knowledge, mystics c ...

This section summarizes objections against strong constructivism that are not objections to weak constructivism as well. (1) It ...

ceives quite disparate unpacking in different streams of Buddhism. It's plausible to conclude that distinct experiences were res ...

of experiences of God sometimes describe what seems to come with the thought included that “This is God.” Whatever the epistemol ...

9.2 The Argument from Perception Various philosophers have defended the evidential value, to one degree or another, of some reli ...

would not be harmful to this approach (Alston 1994). Relevant disanalogy would negatively affect the argument from perception. 1 ...

The disanalogists take the evidential credentials of sense perception as paradigmatic for epistemology. They equate confirming a ...

settings, Richard Swinburne has proposed an ascent to generality as a harmonizing mechanism. Swinburne believes that conflicting ...

naturalistic medium. However, we should take into account that there might be naturalistic explanations that would make it impla ...

Batson, Schoenrade, and Ventis (1993) maintain (comparing religious experiences to creative problem solving) that a person who h ...

certain type of blow to the shoulder to people with a genetic propensity to psoriasis, and that the area of the defect was activ ...

episodes of a solitary person. Philosophers believe these private experiences reveal the meaning and value of mysticism (Jantzen ...

Alston, William P. 1992. “Literal and Nonliteral in Reports of Mystical Experience.” In Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven T. Ka ...

Deikman, Arthur. 1980. “Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience.” In Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods, O.P., 240–69 ...

Griffiths, Paul J. 1993. “Pure Consciousness and Indian Buddhism.” In The Problem of Pure Consciousness, Mysticism and Philosoph ...