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Religious Experience, Emotion, and Belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Wayne Proudfoot
Wayne Proudfoot
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York, NY 10027
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Extract

In the wake of Kant's critique of speculative metaphysics, many students of religion and theology have sought immediate access to the real and a foundation for doctrine and belief in religious experience. It was thought by some that a mode of experience might be discovered that was unscathed by the activity of the imagination in the construction of the forms and categories, and that would be broader than Kant's exclusively moral account of religion. It is not accidental, then, that the phrase “religious experience” has come to be reserved almost exclusively for aspects of experience that are allegedly prereflective, that transcend the verbal, or are in some way free of the structures of thought and judgment that language represents. The search has been for some channel of cognitive immediacy, whether the chosen mode of experience was volitional or affective.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 70 , Issue 3-4 , October 1977 , pp. 343 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1977

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References

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