Download or read book A Comparative Doxastic Practice Epistemology of Religious Experience written by Mark Owen Webb and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-18 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a theoretical enterprise in Christian philosophy of religion and applies it to Buddhism, thus defending Buddhism and presenting it favorably in comparison. Chapters explore how the claims of both Christianity and Theravada Buddhism rest on people’s experiences, so the question as to which claimants to religious knowledge are right rests on the evidential value of those experiences. The book examines mysticism and ways to understand what goes on in religious experiences, helping us to understand whether it is good grounds for religious belief. The author argues that religious language in both Christian and Buddhist traditions is intelligible as factual discourse, and so reports of mystical experience are true or false. The book contends that those experiences can be fruitfully thought of as perceptual in kind and that they are therefore good prima facie grounds for religious belief, in the absence of defeating conditions. The work goes on to explore Christian and Buddhist testimony and how the likelihood of self-deception, self-delusion, imaginative elaboration and the like constitutes a defeating condition. It is shown that this defeater has less scope for operation in the Buddhist case than in the Christian case, and therefore Theravada Buddhism is better grounded. This work will appeal to students and scholars of philosophy and philosophy of religion, and those interested in the study of religious experience.
Download or read book Philosophy of Mysticism written by Richard H. Jones and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive exploration of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. This work is a comprehensive study of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. Mystics claim to experience reality in a way not available in normal life, a claim which makes this phenomenon interesting from a philosophical perspective. Richard H. Joness inquiry focuses on the skeleton of beliefs and values of mysticism: knowledge claims made about the nature of reality and of human beings; value claims about what is significant and what is ethical; and mystical goals and ways of life. Jones engages language, epistemology, metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of mind. Methodological issues in the study of mysticism are also addressed. Examples of mystical experience are drawn chiefly from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but also from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Daoism. This is a significant extension of the seminal work by Walter Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy. That work has stimulated much literature, all of which Jones manages to review here. He critically extends Staces universal core and embeds it in a sophisticated discussion of the extent, range, and metaphysical implications of mysticism. Ralph W. Hood, Jr., coauthor of The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach
Download or read book Perceiving God written by William P. Alston and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Perceiving God, William P. Alston offers a clear and provocative account of the epistemology of religious experience. He argues that the "perception of God"—his term for direct experiential awareness of God—makes a major contribution to the grounds of religious belief. Surveying the variety of reported direct experiences of God among laypersons and famous mystics, Alston demonstrates that a person can be justified in holding certain beliefs about God on the basis of mystical experience. Through the perception that God is sustaining one in being, for example, one can justifiably believe that God is indeed sustaining one in being. Alston offers a detailed discussion of our grounds for taking sense perception and other sources of belief—including introspection, memory, and mystical experience—to be reliable and to confer justification. He then uses this epistemic framework to explain how our perceptual beliefs about God can be justified. Alston carefully addresses objections to his chief claims, including problems posed by non-Christian religious traditions. He also examines the way in which mystical perception fits into the larger picture of grounds for religious belief. Suggesting that religious experience, rather than being a purely subjective phenomenon, has real cognitive value, Perceiving God will spark intense debate and will be indispensable reading for those interested in philosophy of religion, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, as well as for theologians.
Download or read book Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality written by Ayon Maharaj and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering study examines the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna, bringing him into dialogue with Western thinkers. Sri Ramakrishna's expansive conception of God as the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality, Maharaj argues, introduces a new paradigm for addressing central issues in the philosophy of religion.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Meditation written by Stephen Phillips and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Stephen Phillips focuses on one of the most important poems about meditation in world literature, as understood by two of the greatest philosophers of India, one classical, one modern. Sankara's commentaries on the Upanisads are a core of the Vedanta tradition and Aurobindo is a towering figure of 20th-century Hindu thought. This is the first time their approaches have been studied together. The Isa (c. 500 BCE) an Upanisad belongs to a genre of adhyatmika learning-concerning self and consciousness-in early Indian literature. According to the Ancient Indian tradition of yoga, meditation is antithetical to willful bodily and mental action. Breathing is all you do. In the conception of the Isa Upanisad, we are told that the best that comes from meditation is because of what the Lord is. In Sankara's interpretation it comes to block out the little you, whereas according to Aurobindo it comes as a divine connection, an occult Conscious Force belonging to truer part of oneself, atman, and an opening to that self's native energy. Framed around Aurobindo's translation of each of the Isa's eighteen verses, along with a translation of each verse, Phillips follows a different reading of Sankara as laid out in his commentary. All this is done against the backdrop of modern scholarship. Convergences and divergences of these streams are the focus throughout. Appendix A presents the Upanisad with the two readings side by side. This book traces a worldview and consonant yoga teaching common to two authors who are typically taken to be oceans apart, not only chronologically but in intellectual stance. Addressing a huge gap in the contemporary literature on meditation in the Hindu traditions, Phillips presents a compelling new way of thinking about meditation in the Advaita Vedanta philosophy and Upanisad.
Download or read book The Wisdom to Doubt written by J. L. Schellenberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wisdom to Doubt is a major contribution to the contemporary literature on the epistemology of religious belief. Continuing the inquiry begun in his previous book, Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, J. L. Schellenberg here argues that given our limitations and especially our immaturity as a species, there is no reasonable choice but to withhold judgment about the existence of an ultimate salvific reality. Schellenberg defends this conclusion against arguments from religious experience and naturalistic arguments that might seem to make either religious belief or religious disbelief preferable to his skeptical stance. In so doing, he canvasses virtually all of the important recent work on the epistemology of religion. Of particular interest is his call for at least skepticism about theism, the most common religious claim among philosophers. The Wisdom to Doubt expands the author's well-known hiddenness argument against theism and situates it within a larger atheistic argument, itself made to serve the purposes of his broader skeptical case. That case need not, on Schellenberg's view, lead to a dead end but rather functions as a gateway to important new insights about intellectual tasks and religious possibilities.
Download or read book Interpreting Interreligious Relations with Wittgenstein Philosophy Theology and Religious Studies written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-09-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume argues that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion and his thought in general continue to be highly relevant for present and future research on interreligious relations.
Download or read book Religious Experience and Religious Lives written by Walter Scott Stepanenko and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Experience and Religious Lives: An Epistemology defends a moderate approach to religious experiences in which they can contribute to the justification of central religious beliefs, most importantly belief in God. Epistemologists of religion disagree about what evidential value religious experiences have. Some argue that religious experiences have no evidential value while others argue that religious experiences constitute proof of God's existence. However, Walter Scott Stepanenko argues that religious experiences can contribute to these justificatory cases in several distinct ways and that several justificatory cases are philosophically viable. This book contends that this joint justificatory viability is best explained by the diversity and development of religious lives: as religious believers grow in a faith tradition, their access to an evidential base can develop and the contributory work religious experiences provide in defense of religious belief can change. This suggests that various epistemologies of religious experience implicitly emphasize different life stages or different prototypical religious believers and that a fully adequate epistemology of religious experience will be expansive, pluralistic, and responsive to the diversity of religious believers and their development in a religious tradition.
Download or read book The Epistemology of Religious Experience written by Keith E. Yandell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-11-25 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing against the notion that religious experience is ineffable, while advocating the view that it can provide evidence of God's existence, this text contends that social science and nonreligious explanations of religious belief and experience do not cancel out the force of the experience.
Download or read book Perceiving God written by William P. Alston and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-24 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this clear and provocative account of the epistemology of religious experience, William P. Alston argues that the perception of God—his term for direct experiential awareness of God—makes a major contribution to the grounds of religious belief. Surveying the variety of reported direct experiences of God, Alston demonstrates that a person can be justified in holding certain beliefs about God on the basis of mystical experience.
Download or read book Religious Experience written by Amber L. Griffioen and published by . This book was released on 2021-12-23 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element looks critically at the history and epistemology of religious experience and how the concept can be fruitfully expanded.
Download or read book Analytic Philosophy of Religion written by James Franklin Harris and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Gene Long, editor of Kluwer's Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion Series, first invited me to write the volume on Analytic Philosophy of Religion, I accepted with great enthusiasm. My only explanation for that enthusiasm now is that I was younger and more naive at the time. Soon after starting work on the volume, my enthusiasm was dampened by the daunting magnitude of the task. I began as a sprinter and quickly settled into the pace of a long-distance runner. Although I considered myself well read in the subject, I soon discovered that I had a great deal of research to do to be confident that I had considered all of the major contributions to the various discussions, issues, and of religion. As I read more and more problems found within analytic philosophy books and articles, I realized that I had rushed into a territory already well trodden by the angels. I am greatly impressed by the sophistication and subtlety of philosophical argument that characterize the different debates in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. This volume covers a vast amount of material. I have endeavored to provide the fairest possible reading of different authors, and, in cases where I include my own critical evaluations and develop my own positions, I have endeavored to provide the strongest possible interpretations of the positions I criticize.
Download or read book Explaining and Interpreting Religion written by Robert Alan Segal and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1992 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of recent essays on the social scientific study of religion makes the fundamental claim that on the one hand social scientists cannot be facilely grouped into «explainers» rather than «interpreters» of religion and that on the other hand scholars of religious studies - religionists - cannot fend off the social scientific challenge by rejecting explanation for interpretation. Not only are the concepts of explanation and interpretation defined differently in different fields, but by most definitions of the terms religionists and social scientists alike both explain and interpret religion. An acute hiatus between religionists and social scientists remains, but it is over how, not whether, religion gets explained and interpreted.
Download or read book Frederick Douglass and the Philosophy of Religion written by Timothy J. Golden and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick Douglass and the Philosophy of Religion: An Interpretation of Narrative, Art, and the Political addresses Douglass’s narrative method and the reformed epistemology of analytic theism within the context of Incarnational theology. Timothy J. Golden argues that in this context, Douglass’s use of narrative maintains a robust moral, social, and political engagement—and thus a closer connection to an authentic Christian theology—in a way that analytic theism does not. To show this contrast, Golden presents existential and phenomenological interpretations of Douglass, reading him alongside Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Levinas. Golden concludes the book with reflection on how Douglass’s Incarnational theology connects to his future philosophical and theological work, which understands consciousness (subjectivity) as saturated in time understood as history. Golden argues that the resulting view of consciousness helps to overcome abstraction in a variety of philosophical subfields, including jurisprudence and gender studies.
Download or read book Philosophy of Religion written by Keith E. Yandell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keith Yandell's Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction was one of the first textbooks to explore the philosophy of religion with reference to religions other than Christianity. This new, revised edition explores the logical validity and truth claims of several world religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism—with updated, streamlined discussions on important topics in philosophy of religion such as: Religious pluralism Freedom and responsibility Evidentialist Moral Theism Reformed Epistemology Doxastic Practice Epistemology The problem of evil Ontological and cosmological arguments Other new features include updated Questions for Reflection,and new Annotated Bibliographies for each chapter, as well as an updated Glossary. This exciting new edition, much like its classic predecessor, is sure to be a classroom staple for undergraduate students studying philosophy of religion, as well as a comprehensive introductory read for anyone interested in the subject.
Download or read book God Reason and Religions written by Eugene Thomas Long and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first issue of the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion appeared in the Spring, 1970. This collection of essays is presented in cele bration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal. Contributors to the volume are to be counted among today's leading philosophers of religion. They represent different approaches to the philosophical consideration of religion and their published work is helping shape discussions of the philos ophy of religion as we approach the beginning of the twenty-first century. Considered by some to be terminal at mid-century, the philosophy of reli gion has undergone a renaissance during the second half of the century. And the journal may be said to provide some of the explanation for this develop ment. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Edgar Henderson, Robert Leet Patterson and Henry Sprinkle, founders of the journal. Without their vision and determination it would not have come into existence.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion written by William Wainwright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-16 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion contains newly commissioned chapters by 21 prominent experts who cover the field in a comprehensive but accessible manner. Each chapter is expository, critical, and representative of a distinctive viewpoint.
