CFP: Religions Special Issue: Religious Experience and Metaphysics

Dear Colleagues,

In this issue, we seek to address relationships between religious or spiritual experience (RSE) and metaphysics. RSE are associated with interruptions in ordinary language/common sense experience of the everyday (cf. Dahl; Barber; Heidegger). RSE interruptions create specific changes in perception, but it is not clear if and how RSE phenomena as described by i.e. mystics(such as internal perception of light, sound, altered perception of the body (re: spatiality, density, depth, other parameters), internal stillness, motion, presence or disconnect, etc.) impact one’s beliefs and/or attendant metaphysical (pre)suppositions. Do RSE change empirical realism of the natural attitude, religious attitude, or one’s metaphysics of the self? In the first panel, we invite concrete empirical and textual investigations of relationships between the perceptual and conceptual aspects of RSE across different traditions. The papers can include both first-person and second-person descriptive phenomenological research or an intertwining of different phenomenological analyses.

We also are seeking revisionist metaphysical proposals that include a reference to formal phenomenological analyses of consciousness in RSE. By contrast with the ordinary experience of objects, originary self-giving in RSE can be non-associative, open-ended, undetermined; in other words, excluding mental or "real" (empirically so) objects. Therefore, a descriptive metaphysics of such consciousness needs to be non-object related (cf. Ladyman, French). What is the nature of reality “displayed” by RSE? Besides covering the metaphysics of consciousness, the panel welcomes speculative extensions of such phenomenologically grounded metaphysics into realist contexts, such as e.g., metaphysics of the quantum world or Minkowski space-time.

Prof. Dr. Olga Louchakova-Schwartz
Guest Editor