PHIL 266 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Religious Experience, Wayne Proudfoot
5 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Interested in what it is like to the person who experiences a sacred event, and how a person knows the are experiencing it. Describes 2 different religious experiences she had: (1) the experience consists in pure consciousness without the implication of the imagination. (2) the experience is accompanied by images (literally involves the imagination) Both experiences have a problem: the problem of deception. Defended the legitimacy of claims of religious experience, while believing that they could be analyzed in external terms (third-person terms) Four characteristics of a mystical state of consciousness. (1) it is ineffable (too great to be expressed or described in words) (2) they have a noetic quality (they bring about some new, concrete knowledge) (3) they are transient (one can"t hope to stay in hem for an extended period of one"s life) (4) they are passive (they are not brought on by an act of will, but rather happen to a person)
