CFP: APA Central 2025 SOPHERE session

METAPHYSICS AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

The 2025 APA Central Division Meeting will be held February 20-22, 2025, and February 27-March 1. All sessions will be on-line. The Society for Phenomenology of Religious Experience will sponsor an affiliated group session on metaphysics and religious experience.

Many of those who have religious/spiritual experiences find systematic metaphysics irrelevant to those experiences, and yet one might wonder whether they do depend on unexamined metaphysical presuppositions. This session will inquire into the relationship between religious/spiritual experience and metaphysics. Are religious/spiritual experiences completely independent of metaphysics? Or, do they depend on metaphysics? If so, how? If religious/spiritual experiences do depend in some way on metaphysics, do the different metaphysical frameworks people espouse (and these are often diverse, depending on the diversity of religious/spiritual traditions and cultures world-wide) affect the kinds of religious/spiritual experience they have? Does religious/spiritual experience determine what metaphysical outlook should be adopted (e.g. Classical Theism or Process Theology)? Is there a danger of equating metaphysics with religious/spiritual experience? Does such an equation end up undermining religious/spiritual experience or end up in incoherence as various critiques of onto-theology suggest? Do metaphysics and religious/spiritual experience represent distinctive and yet related provinces of meaning, in Alfred Schutz’s sense? Is there a philosophical obligation to give an account of the metaphysical suppositions underlying one religious/spiritual experience out of a sense of philosophical responsibility in Husserl’s sense? Do metaphysical articulations help build a bridge between religious/spiritual experience and science, as Max Scheler thought? Papers ought to make use in some way of phenomenological methodology. Abstracts of up to 500 words or completed papers should be sent to [email protected] by August 1.

Michael Barber

Session Organizer

[email protected]

https://sophere.org/apa-participation/central/