The Relationship between Mind and Nature

Delimiting Religion

The standard scientific psychological account of social psychological science is inadequate because it is a direct mapping of an inadequate scientific empiricist account onto the social psychological domain. The critical arguments of the hermeneutical psychologist are vitiated because they are based not upon real contrasts with causal explanations in natural science, but upon contrasts between explanations of human action and scientific empiricist accounts of causal explanation in science. Some of these arguments were noted in Chapter 4. The absence of empirical invariance and the limits on prediction cast no more doubt upon the adequacy of causal explanations in social psychological science than they do upon the adequacy of causal explanations in natural science. According to a realist account, empirical invariance and predictability are not criteria for the adequacy of a causal explanation.

The paper considers the problem of the transfer of religious experience, consisting of two elements: the problem of the features of individual religious experience and the problem of testimony in relation to religious experience. Religious experience seems to be more difficult to transfer through testimony than other types of experience. The search for the causes of these features leads either to the assertion that these are features of the religious experience itself, or to the assertion that these are features of a certain type of testimony. Based on these features and, most often, adopting the first option, opponents of theism try to reduce religious experience to cognitive distortions and disorders, and supporters of theism try to create a special epistemological description of this experience in order to protect it. The author made an attempt to substantiate the thesis that difficulties in transferring religious experience arise in special specific cases and only due to the features of the transfer of experience, and not due to the features of religious experience as such. These statements are based on the approach proposed by the author to the analysis of objects of religious, scientific, and everyday experience. This approach combines natural and supernatural objects of experience into a single class of objects. The most significant feature of the approach is the assertion that such unique supernatural objects of experience as miracles differ from other objects of experience only epistemically, but not ontologically. Considering the epistemological consequences of this approach, the author comes to the stated theses.

In the philosophy of science, an impression is created that scientific explanations are perhaps a preserve of physical and natural sciences. Although social scientists in organizational research have borrowed most modals of scientific explanations from natural scientists, they have met harsh criticism from their counterparts in the natural and physical sciences. This paper set out to explain how scientific explanations can be constructed successfully in organizational studies using modals borrowed from natural sciences. Basing on the critical literature review, the paper has successfully argued that, organizational research applies models of scientific explanations using sense making. In the case of the covering law model, it has been argued that the model connects well with sense making in organizational research in many respects since sense making recognizes explanandum in terms of organizational events that people experience in everyday life. The paper has also indicated that in the statistical-probabilistic model explanations are based on non-deductive reasoning and make it hard for the researcher to predict the explanandum with certainty except with some degree of probability. This applies in both organizational studies as well as in natural sciences. Like in the statistical probability model, causal-effect relationships can also be demonstrated statistically in organizational research. Moreover, the fact that organizational researchers have different traditions from those of ‘number crunchers’ does not make such traditions inferior. Lastly, the unification model portrays scientific explanations as constructed in a unified design. The paper has shown that in organizational research, unification manifests quite differently from the natural sciences. Organizations operate in unstable condition in the sense that there are so many disciplines under organizational research.

В статье рассматривается проблема передачи религиозного опыта, состоящая из двух элементов: проблемы особенностей индивидуального религиозного опыта и проблемы свидетельства в отношении религиозного опыта. Религиозный опыт, как кажется, сложнее поддаётся передаче посредством свидетельства, чем иные виды опыта. Поиск причин возникновения данных особенностей приводит либо к утверждению, что это проявление особенностей самого религиозного опыта, либо к утверждению, что это проявление особенностей определенного вида свидетельства. Исходя из этих особенностей и чаще всего принимая первый вариант, противники теизма пытаются редуцировать религиозный опыт к когнитивным искажениям и нарушениям, а сторонники теизма — создать особое эпистемологическое описание данного опыта с целью его защиты. Автором предпринята попытка обоснования тезиса, что трудности в передаче религиозного опыта возникают в специфических случаях и только вследствие особенностей определенного вида свидетельства, а не вследствие особенностей религиозного опыта как такового. Указанные утверждения базируются на предложенном автором подходе к анализу объектов религиозного, научного и обыденного опыта. Данный подход объединяет естественные и сверхъестественные объекты опыта в единый класс объектов. Наиболее значимой особенностью подхода является утверждение, что такие уникальные сверхъестественные объекты опыта, как чудеса, отличаются от иных объектов опыта только эпистемически, но не онтологически. Рассматривая эпистемологические следствия данного подхода, автор приходит к заявленным тезисам.

Hearing a voice in the absence of any speaker can be a significant feature of psychiatric illness, but is also increasingly acknowledged as an important aspect of everyday, non-pathological experience. This recognition has led to a growth of interest in voice-hearing in individuals without any psychiatric diagnosis, coupled with greater attention to the subjective experience of voice-hearing across diagnostic groups. Research has also focused on the overlap between some aspects of voice-hearing phenomenology and everyday experiences such as ‘hearing’ the voices of fictional characters and spiritual experience. In this Review, we synthesize research on the range of cognitive, neural, personal and sociocultural processes that contribute to voice-hearing as it occurs in clinical, non-clinical and everyday experience, with particular emphasis on linking mechanism to phenomenology. Heterogeneous forms of voice-hearing can be understood in terms of differing patterns of association among underlying mechanisms. We suggest an approach to hallucinatory experience that sees it as partly continuous with everyday inner experience, but which is critical regarding whether continuity of phenomenology across the clinical–non-clinical divide should be taken to entail continuity of mechanism. Hearing voices has long been associated with severe mental illness but also occurs in the general population. In this Review, Toh et al. describe the cognitive, neural, personal and sociocultural processes that contribute to voice-hearing in clinical, non-clinical and everyday experience, with emphasis on linking mechanism to phenomenology.

“Experience” is a category that seems to have developed new meaning in European thought after the Enlightenment when personal inwardness took on the weight of an absent God. The inner self (including, a little later, a sub- or unconscious mind) rose to prominence about 200–300 years ago, around the time of the “Counter-Enlightenment” and Romanticism, and enjoyed a rich and long life in philosophy (including Lebensphilosophie) and religious studies, but began a steep descent under fire around 1970. The critique of “essentialism” (the claim that experience is self-validating and impervious to historical and scientific explanation or challenge) was probably the main point of attack, but there were others. The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, et al.) claimed that authentic experience was difficult or impossible in the modern capitalist era. The question of the reality of the individual self to which experience happens also threatened to undermine the concept. This paper argues that the religious experience characteristic of Sāṃkhya and Yoga, while in some ways paralleling Romanticism and Lebensphilosophies, differs from them in one essential way. Sāṃkhyan/Yogic experience is not something that happens to, or in, an individual person. It does not occur to or for oneself (in the usual sense) but rather puruṣārtha, “for the sake of [artha] an innermost consciousness/self”[puruṣa] which must be distinguished from the “solitude” of “individual men” (the recipient, for William James, of religious experience) which would be called ahaṃkāra, or “ego assertion” in the Indian perspectives. The distinction found in European Lebensphilosophie between two kinds of experience, Erlebnis (a present-focused lived moment) and Erfahrung (a constructed, time-binding thread of life, involving memory and often constituting a story) helps to understand what is happening in Sāṃkhya and Yoga. The concept closest to experience in Sāṃkhya/Yoga is named by the Sanskrit root dṛś-, “seeing,” which is a process actualized through long meditative practice and close philosophical reasoning. The Erfahrung “story” enacted in Sāṃkhya/Yoga practice is a sort of dance-drama in which psychomaterial Nature (prakṛti) reveals to her inner consciousness and possessor (puruṣa) that she “is not, has nothing of her own, and does not have the quality of being an ‘I’” (nāsmi na me nāham). This self exposure as “not I” apophatically reveals puruṣa, and lets him shine for them both, as pure consciousness. Prakṛti’s long quest for puruṣa, seeking him with the finest insight (jñāna), culminates in realization that she is not the seer in this process but the seen, and that her failure has been to assert aham (“I”) rather than realize nāham, “Not I.” Her meditation and insight have led to an experience which was always for an Other, though that was not recognized until the story’s end. Rather like McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” the nature or structure of experience in Sāṃkhya and Yoga is also its content, what religious experience is about in these philosophies and practices. In Western terms, we have religious experience only when we recognize what (all) experience (already) is: the unfolding story of puruṣārtha. Experience deepens the more we see that it is not ours; the recognition of non-I, in fact, is what makes genuine experience possible at all.

The vast majority of philosophical work on explanation has concerned itself with scientific explanation. Aside from the obvious importance of science, another factor sometimes cited in support of this partiality is that there is ‘a substantial continuity between the sorts of explanations found in science and at least some forms of explanation found in more ordinary non-scientific contexts’ (Woodward 2009, p. 2). The idea seems to be that, by focusing on explanation in science, philosophers will be able to isolate and analyze features of explanatory practice that hold more generally. A notable exception to the above claim of continuity is explanation in mathematics. This topic was entirely ignored in the ‘first wave’ of work by analytic philosophers on explanation in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The situation has changed considerably over the past couple of decades, and there is now a significant amount of philosophical attention being paid specifically to the issue of mathematical explanation. Moreover, even philosophers whose main focus is on scientific explanation often acknowledge the existence of explanations within pure mathematics. Nonetheless, the predominant view is that mathematical explanation is qualitatively different both from scientific explanation and from explanation in ‘ordinary non-scientific contexts’. Thus the editors of a recent volume on interdisciplinary approaches to explanation write that ‘your explanation of why you’ll be home late for dinner and a mathematician’s proof of a theorem share very little’ (Wilson & Keil 2000, p. 91). There are good reasons for analyzing mathematical explanation separately from scientific explanation. Adopting this approach acknowledges the clear intuitive differences between these two spheres of explanatory practice, while also allowing theorists in one sphere to proceed unencumbered by potential counterexamples from the other. However, there is a fairly obvious problem with this neat picture, and that is that the spheres of mathematical practice and scientific practice frequently overlap. It is all very well emphasizing the qualitative differences between scientific explanation and its mathematical counterpart, but what about scientific explanations that make use of mathematics? Following Paolo Mancosu, I shall define a mathematical explanation in science (MES) to be ‘an explanation in natural science carried out by essential appeal to mathematical facts’ (Mancosu 2008, p. 135). An example of an MES that has been discussed at some length in the literature concerns the life-cycle of the North American

Les tâches de la science géographique dans les conditions actuelles de la révolution scientifique et technique

Although Thomas Luckmann was at the origin of secularization theory, which is considered to have finally lost its relevance in the early 1990s, some parts of his theory of religion are still of interest. This paper focuses on the transcendence concept, which is assumed to be crucial for Luckmann’s theory of religion and remains a relevant resource for the study of religion today. The text advances and substantiates the thesis that explicitly or implicitly, three types of transcendence can be found in Lukman’s theory of religion. The description of the anthropological transcendence focuses on the transcending of the human organism to the social world. The explication of this process leads us to the conclusion that the condition for the possibility of religion is the property of the organism to construct gradients of importance before any reflection on this importance. The description of phenomenological transcendence focuses on the process of “shrinking” of the experience of the transcendent underlying religion: from religions of “great” transcendence (world religions), to religions of “medium” or even “little” transcendence (privatized religions). The discussion of this type leads to the idea that religious experience does not disturb the course of everyday life, but is a condition of it, and that although any experience can be the basis of religion, there must be a way of selecting experiences that have a higher probability of being experienced religiously. The description of sociological transcendence focuses on the process of internalization and reconstruction of self-evident “ultimate” socially objectified significances (socio-historical a priori) transcendent to the individual and underlying their everyday life. In this sense, the process of privatization of religion suggests that the practice of “choosing” a private religion is part of, rather than a condition of, a system of “ultimate” significance. Understood in this way, Lukman’s theory of transcendence allows us to look at some relationships important for the sociology of religion from a different angle. For example, the relationship between religion in the public and private sphere, the relationship between religious and everyday experience, and the relationship between the functional boundaries of religious and secular institutions.

The word naturalism is used in many different ways in contemporary philosophy. For some it has required that a properly naturalistic account of anything appeal only to what is countenanced by the natural sciences and, for a few, that any object of study be reduced to entities and forces studied by physics and chemistry. Research programs have been developed to “naturalize” numbers, norms, intentional states, and other seemingly recalcitrant concepts by performing the requisite reduction. But a naturalistic account should be concerned with explanation, not reduction. Even when granting a priority to the sciences, social scientific and historical explanations should not be ruled out of court from the outset. Attention to those explanations, as well as to the actual methods of the natural sciences, raises questions about the status in such an account of norms, values, and rule-governed practices. The issues of what is to count as a science and how one might place normative concepts with respect to the language of science have been matters of lively debate since the nineteenth century. Recently, there have been a number of attempts to formulate more liberal conceptions of naturalism.1 The Australian philosopher Huw Price distinguishes two ways of thinking about the topic.2 In the first the problem is regarded as one of where to place the normative in a world described by the natural sciences. How does one place values in a world of facts? The second, which Price favors, would begin with what science tells us about ourselves. Science tells us that humans are natural creatures, and our philosophical claims ought to be developed in accord with that. We can then try to explain in naturalistic terms how creatures like ourselves come to talk in these various ways. The point is not to place norms, values, and mental states in a landscape of science but to examine the language of norms and of states of mind as the product of human beings as natural creatures. In order to study this particular kind of natural creature, we must study its language and its culture. That study of

This Element looks at religious experience and the role it has played in philosophy of religion. It critically explores the history of the intertwined discourses on mysticism and religious experience, before turning to a few specific discussions within contemporary philosophy of religion. One debate concerns the question of perennialism vs. constructivism and whether there is a 'common core' to all religious or mystical experience independent of interpretation or socio-historical background. Another central discussion concerns the epistemology of purportedly theophanic experience and whether a perceptual model of religious experience can provide evidence or justification for theistic belief. The Element concludes with a discussion of how philosophy of religion can productively widen its treatment of religious experience in the service of creating a more inclusive and welcoming discipline.

This paper discusses the role spiritual experience has played in regard to individuals’ affiliation to Swami Muktananda’s Siddha Yoga; that is, individuals’ spiritual experience prior to their affiliation with Siddha Yoga. This study shows that individuals’ prior spiritual experience eventually became integrated into their conversion motif (this does not deny that other attractions or influences were not involved, just that this paper focuses on prior spiritual experience). For the participants in this study, prior spiritual experience appeared, in retrospect, as almost a calling or their ‘Road to Damascus.’ When participants in this study reported having spiritual experience prior to involvement in Siddha Yoga, it was both a positive revelation and also something at times overwhelming and difficult to place in everyday experience or the dominant religious traditions. It was also a powerful and transformative experience which, more that 30 years later, is still a significant aspect of their continuing spiritual journey and personal narrative. For the individuals in this study, their prior religious experience appeared, even for a time, to have found a context in the framework of Siddha Yoga.

Before one can adequately deal with a biblical and neurobiological examination of spiritual experiences, one would need to define what they are. Here, one could offer that a spiritual experience could be an encounter with something or someone that is other than a material experience. It is a supernatural experience that transcends the natural, yet impacts the natural, by affecting our mental and physical senses and how we practise our spirituality. It is an experience that leaves us with a new and perhaps intense sense of otherness. One could further propose that as spiritual experiences are by nature ‘experiences’, they are inherently subjective, and can therefore be classified as personal encounters. In other words, we have unique spiritual experiences in our encounters with God. This article offers several such examples and shows the significance of looking inwardly to answer the important question of why we are (or not) transforming spiritually and mentally.Contribution: The article’s challenge is to not only show that science and theology are not in conflict, but also how the intersection and emerging field of neurobiology (natural science) and theology can help better understand how spiritual experiences manifest, and that naturally we are seemingly wired for these experiences.

What is the value of religious and spiritual experiences within human life? Are we evolutionarily programmed to have such experiences? How will emerging technologies change such experiences in the future? Wesley Wildman addresses these key intellectual questions and more, offering a spiritually evocative naturalist interpretation of the diverse variety of religious and spiritual experiences. He describes these experiences, from the common to the exceptional, and offers innovative classifications for them based on their neurological features and internal qualities. His account avoids reductionistic oversimplifications and instead synthesizes perspectives from many disciplines, including philosophy and natural sciences, into a compelling account of the meaning and value of religious and spiritual experiences in human life. The resulting interpretation does not assume a supernatural worldview but incorporates religious and spiritual experiences into a positive affirmation of this-worldly existence.