Religious Experience - Paperback

by Wayne Proudfoot (Author)

How is religious experience to be identified, described, analyzed and explained? Is it independent of concepts, beliefs, and practices? How can we account for its authority? Under what conditions might a person identify his or her experience as religious? Wayne Proudfoot shows that concepts, beliefs, and linguistic practices are presupposed by the rules governing this identification of an experience as religious. Some of these characteristics can be understood by attending to the conditions of experience, among which are beliefs about how experience is to be explained.

Back Jacket

This book is about that idea of religious experience which has been so influential in religious thought and the study of religion in the past two centuries. It is an examination of some of the most important theories of religious experience, an elucidation of the idea or concept as it is presupposed by discussions of such topics as mysticism and reductionism in the study of religion, and a consideration of the implications of these theories and this idea for contemporary issues in the philosophy of religion.

Author Biography

Wayne Proudfoot is Professor of Religion at Columbia University.