A Phenomenological Study of the Christian Experience of God (original) (raw)
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PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IV: RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND DESCRIPTION, EDITED BY OLGA LOUCHAKOVA-SCHWARTZ, 2020
In this Introduction to the topical issue of Open Theology, I sketch research-related themes in the topic of description of religious experience. According to phenomenology, clarifications in the expression of experience are necessary first steps towards both the theory of knowledge in its cognitive and transcendental "incarnations" and the consequent metaphysics. Description gives one an access to ideal apriori-s and the transcendental ego as they are lived in one's experience. As Husserl himself shows in the beginning of Logical Investigations, in its unity with meaning, description has to be approached by means of phenomenological analyses.
The Multiple Contents of Experience: Representation and the Awareness of Phenomenal Qualities (2009)
'The Multiple Contents of Experience: Representation and the Awareness of Phenomenal Qualities' [Forthcoming in Philosophical Topics: Perception and Intentionality, Vol 37:1, (2009), 25-48.] ABSTRACT This paper examines the contents of perceptual experience, and focuses in particular on the relation between the representational aspects of an experience and its phenomenal character. It is argued that the Critical Realist two-component analysis of experience, advocated by Wilfrid Sellars, is preferable to the Intentionalist view. Experiences have different kinds of representational contents: both informational and intentional. An understanding of the essential navigational role of perception provides a principled way of explaining the nature of such representational contents. Experiences also have a distinct phenomenal content, or character, which is not determined by representational content. KEY WORDS: Perceptual experience; perceptual content; critical realism; phenomenal qualities; representation; intentionalism; causal theory of perception; navigational account; Wilfrid Sellars;
The double structure of experience
In this essay I would like to explore a theme which is eminently phenomenological in that it deals with the relationship between experience and thinking. I am interested in the structure of experience as such and in the possibilities of thinking which can be developed from experience. My particular inquiry will deal with the moment when experience exceeds thinking and is exceeded by it at the same time. Although the care concerning this experience of exceeding can be understood as an enterprise in the phenomenological tradition, it is obvious, however, that it requires a reinterpretation of the classical phenomenological method. It concerns rather the moment of experience which is concealed and overlooked by classical phenomenology and which emerges only when thinking subordinates itself again to the authority of experience. The method of this work might seem to be philosophically suspect at first: it does not try to assert itself, including its presuppositions, by means of its performance, but it risks a somewhat centrifugal tendency within which it can leave itself.
The Nature of Experience: Empirical Considerations and Theological Ramifications
Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith, 2017
Recent theological writings indicate that theological conclusions are, to some extent, predicated on theologians' understandings of experience. Furthermore, recent and contemporary theologians are not unified in their understandings. George Lindbeck recognizes this scenario in his influential work The Nature of Doctrine (2009/1984), where he also describes two opposing ideologies as experiential-expressivism and cultural-linguistic theory. The former is basically ignorant of social construction and therefore claims that religious experiences are basically identical across cultures; the latter recognizes social construction and therefore claims that religious experiences are basically different across cultures. While many theologians tend towards one of these views, neither is sufficient from a perspective informed by cognitive science. In conjunction with studies of cognition, affect, and behavior, this article argues for a revised understanding of experience that recognizes the principles of mediation and degrees of cross-cultural sharing. Some implications of this revised understanding for interreligious dialogue and theology of religions will then be discussed.
“Being tied to experience”: towards a subjective account of the phenomenology of the event
Continental Philosophy Review, 2022
In this text, Heidegger's notion of the event is understood as a rupture on an ontological level. From this follows the aporia of whether the event concerns the coming about of being itself, or of beings. To address the ontological as well as the ontic aspect of the event, the article suggests to understand the event in a subjective framework, in line with transcendental conditions of experience, specifically as a "receptivity" to the event. The main part of the article considers existing phenomenological approaches to the event and the possibility or impossibility of a receptivity to the event expressed therein. In conclusion, the article suggests that the subjective event can be conceived as a rupture within subjective experience, as being tied to the necessary coming about of experience.
Religious Experience and Phenomenology
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan. Religious experience and the experiential dimension of religious practice have come to constitute a fruitful area of inquiry for anthropology. Phenomenology has been of key importance in developing anthropological approaches to study the experiential side of religion and continues to inspire new developments in this area. Key authors in the anthropology of religion, such as Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner, have drawn on the phenomenological school in philosophy to think through the ways in which humans experience the world, constitute their lifeworlds, and theorize how religious experience emerges. Furthermore, since the late 1980s, several prominent anthropologists have drawn on phenomenology to create fresh approaches to and representations of subjects that are of interest to the anthropology of religion, such as ritual, witchcraft and sorcery, healing, and religious experience. This trend was partly a reaction to structural-ism but scholars were often also prompted to draw on phenomenology as an inspiration when confronted with phenomena that seemed to have no place in Western scientific and secular understandings of the world. To some extent, the influence of phenomenology, particularly in studying phenomena usually found under the umbrella of the anthropology of religion, has involved an epistemological project to find a nonreductive way to understand such phenomena. Phenomenological anthropology has created pathways both into how people come to experience these phenomena as real, as well as into the ways the anthropologist, as an embodied subject, comes to understand people's lifeworlds.
A Broader Concept of Experience?
PhaenEx, 2020
The work of Anthony J. Steinbock on emotions―particularly moral emotions―and on religious experience is closely related to a methodological claim. This claim is that the concepts of “experience” and “manifestation” should be understood in a broader manner than that of classical phenomenology, particularly Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In this paper, I examine the way in which Steinbock understands and conceptualizes the kind of givenness to which he refers with the notion of “vertical experience”. I focus on his claim that vertical experiences are irreducible to the kind of experiences that can be described in terms of what he calls “provocation”, “presentation” and the “noesis-noema structure”. Even though I make a criticism of his assertion that the latter implies that they should not be understood as forms of givenness founded on the above-mentioned structure, I agree with some major implications that he draws from them. In the last part of the paper, I discuss his suggestion t...
CHAPTER FOUR: THE NATURE OF INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE
This chapter explores the gestalt therapy tenet of individual experience, including the phenomenological method employed by gestalt therapists to follow an individual's experience. There are many aspects to all this but a starting point is in the way a therapist can follow a client's unfolding experience and utilize descriptions of it that heighten the awareness of the client with regards to what he or she is doing and how he or she is doing it.