Preface to Wisdom of the Senses (original) (raw)

Coming to (Terms with) Our Senses: Seeing, Hearing and Smelling the Gods

Journal of Early Christian History, 2017

Divinities all over the world are seen, heard and smelled. It is remarkable how common reports of sensory perception of the gods are and how casually they are presented, similar to any other sensory perception. Furthermore, scholarship contains a fairly detailed picture of the first-person reports about seeing, hearing and smelling divinities. Both reports about sensing the gods and scholarly reports about such accounts will briefly be introduced before the neurophenomenology of sensory perception is looked at as an additional conversation partner in this debate. This article is an attempt to appreciate the complexity of the biocultural processes that constitute sensory perception as well as to critically engage with claims of sensing the divine because immaterial gods and supernatural entities and agents cannot be seen, heard or smelled in any ordinary sense. The aim of this article is to explore the crosscultural and neurophenomenology of the senses and sensory perception as a background to understanding claims of perceiving the divine; it is not to add any new analysis or description of first-person accounts or actual instances of sensory perception of the divine but a theoretical reflection about the senses and sensory perception. An attempt at understanding what is going on when the divine is seen, heard and smelled is not made in order to dismiss or endorse such claims but to situate them. Sensing the gods leads to believing but believing also leads to perceiving.

The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives - Workshop Program

Congressi Stefano Franscini (Monte Verità, Ascona) Workshop The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives Sunday 23 April 2023 – Wednesday 26 April 2023 Esoteric Sensorium: Olfactory Sense and Jewish Demonology Anna Sierka (Religious Studies) Harvard University

Review essay: Charting the return to the senses

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2008

Reestablishing interest in our senses and sensibilities is seemingly obvious, symptomatic of the repatriation and revalidation of earlier prohibitions against sensual pleasures and delights in Western cultural history. Especially since Classen's Worlds of Sense in 1993 and Stoller's Sensuous Scholarship in 1997, the explosion of interest in anthropology and cultural history has started to literally signify something novel in the way the humanities and social sciences approach, categorise, describe, and represent sensory experiences, and is attentive to cultural variations in the construction of sensory hierarchies. Much of this work has bemoaned the dominant emphasis on visuality in Western industrialised cultures. The recent wave of sensuous scholarship [including the works reviewed here, but also, for example,

Mark R. Wynn, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life

Journal of Analytic Theology, 2014

Mark Wynn explores the way that religious thoughts and feelings can function as shapers of our sensory experience, making available renewed possibilities for practical and ethical engagement with our physical environment. It is a "familiar truth," Wynn says, that "one and the same sensory scene can appear to us in very different ways" depending upon the one's "bodily and emotional condition, our repertoire of concepts and our conception of our circumstances" (vi). He focuses on three aspects of this conceptual and emotional "coloring" of our sense-perception: its impact on the way things appear to us (the modes of perception), on what we take to appear (the objects of perception), and on how those appearances become available to us (the formation of our perceptual capacities).

Against the Senses, Harmonia Philosophica, 2022

Harmonia Philosophica, 2022

The validity of the senses we use to experience the cosmos is something we take for granted. The majority of the people view the senses as the most effective and potentially the only tool they have to reach reality. But as Shestov rightfully questioned, when was the last time the majority decided correctly on an important philosophical problem? The role of science and philosophy is to question the obvious and this is what we should do if we are to uncover the true role of the senses. This paper uses a series of philosophy articles to touch on the problem of the senses and the answer portrayed is exciting as well as terrifying: The senses are not a helpful tool but more of a hurdle when it comes to understanding the cosmos…

Senses and Religion. Introductory Thoughts

Traditiones, 2007

the theme 1 of the "senses and religion" conference of the sieF Commission for Folk religion (9-12 september 2006, Celje, slovenia) was based on two pillars. one was the sensual perception of reality and within this the place of the five human senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste), and the other was religion as a process of cognition, in which the role of sensual perception may differ from one age and one culture to another. it is through our senses that we experience the natural and social reality around us. With their help we can know this reality, perceive interconnections, and shape relationships. the senses are gateways to memory, gateways to knowledge. this is a kind of cognition and communication that is culturally determined and creates forms dependent on culture. this means that the cultural use of the senses is not incidental, but can be described as a cultural system. however the rules are not immutable; they can be modified with the passing of time and changing circumstances. especially strong changes have occurred in the past two centuries with the rapid advance of technical civilization. this applies not only to the culture of the senses, but also to scientific research on sensual perception. the situation has changed from a superficial knowledge of sensual perception to a state of understanding. this is the consequence of psychological, scientific, and medical studies and research on the senses over the past 200 to 250 years. their findings have been incorporated into our everyday lives, also becoming part of commercial and advertising activity in the 20th and 21st centuries. in recent decades we have even seen the appearance