Perception in Religious/Spiritual Experience
This is a call for contributions to panels of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, to be hold at the meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco in April 2023 (for specifics please visit the APA website)
We invite phenomenalistic (empirical) and phenomenological (Husserlian or any other kinds of phenomenology) accounts of perception in religious and spiritual experience (RSA). Examples of such experiences may include a variety of meditation experience; experiences of traditional piety (Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and other); spontaneous experiences, e.g. while reading religious texts, experience of “spiritual emergence”, and conversion; experience of devotion or prayer, etc., as well as experiences described in the first-person perspective by Merleau-Ponty, Lacoste, Husserl (HUA XVII), Schopenhauer, Fichte, Scheler or other philosophers. It can be also experiences described in traditional texts, e.g. by St. Paul, Milarepa, or Sri Ramana Maharshi. However, these papers should be not merely accounts of perception, but high-quality research studies linked to familiar philosophical topics. A descriptive account must be accompanied by philosophical reflection, either along the lines of phenomenological theory or reaching into the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, logic, or the analysis of language. Thus, the analysis of perception in RSE should serve as a ground for philosophizing. Cross-cultural comparisons are encouraged.
Please submit an abstract of 300 words to olouch@ucdavis.edu . You should receive a response email acknowledging your submission. The deadline for submission is September 10; notifications of acceptance will be send out by Sept 14. Questions: olouchakova@gmail.com; olouch@ucdavis.edu.
PS. The best papers will be invited for publication as monographs in the Lexington Press series Phenomenologies of Religious Experience,