Sophia
March 1, 2025
Erik Kuravsky
1 citation
The essay interprets psychedelic peak experiences as mystical events that cannot be reduced to mere psychological effects or explained by natural science. It argues that mainstream scientific ontology is a version of the 'ontology of presence,' which creates a gap between science and human experience. Existential anxiety, understood through Heidegger's ontology, is presented as the core dimension of spiritual transformation. The phenomenology of mystical psychedelic experiences is interpreted as overcoming this anxiety by facing nothingness and transforming one's stance into a sense of original belongingness to the field of emptiness, as described by Nishitani. Various aspects of psychedelic experience are explained through this ontological transformation.
Sophia
March 1, 2022
Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir
1 citation
Luce Irigaray's philosophy of the child, presented in her 2017 book To Be Born, reframes the child not as a rights-bearing subject needing care but as a metaphor for a new human being rooted in natural belonging. Building on her earlier work on sexuate difference and the repressed feminine, Irigaray argues that the child within each adult—a source of embodied, affective thinking—has been silenced and repressed. She calls for philosophical thinking to reconnect with these early experiential layers, aligning with methodologies like Claire Petitmengin's microphenomenology and Eugene Gendlin's felt sense. This approach offers a basis for embodied philosophical inquiry for a new era.
Sophia
April 16, 2026
Milad Milani, Zolt Salontai
Al-Ghazālī and Gregory Palamas both resisted the overintellectualization of theology through Greek philosophical categories, critiquing Aristotelian and Platonic conceptions of knowledge for abstracting the divine and reducing metaphysical inquiry to rational demonstration. Al-Ghazālī turned to Sufism and the epistemology of kashf ("unveiling"), grounding knowledge of God in direct, transformative spiritual experience. Palamas defended the Eastern Christian tradition of hesychia, asserting that divine energies can be encountered in contemplative prayer (theōria) as a step towards union or divinisation (theosis). The article explores parallels between al-Ghazālī's distinction between speculative knowledge and spiritual certainty and Palamas' essence-energies distinction, both affirming non-conceptual participation in the divine. Drawing on Heidegger's later thought, the article considers both figures as pointing toward truth as "unconcealment" (aletheia) rather than propositional mastery, though without asserting identical conclusions.
Sophia
April 14, 2026
José Eduardo Porcher
Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion, presents a hierarchical polytheism grounded in graded immanence, challenging monotheistic assumptions in philosophy of religion. Divine agency is distributed across multiple autonomous beings whose cooperation sustains the cosmos, with vitality (axé) circulating through relations among deities, humans, and material elements. This structure of multi-devotionalism reveals a metaphysics of relational co-constitution and participation, termed entitology. Decolonizing philosophy of religion requires engaging such Afro-diasporic grammars of divinity as sources of metaphysical insight rather than objects of comparative classification.
Sophia
January 14, 2021
Daniel H. Spencer
This article argues that the study of mysticism presents a significant challenge for Christian analytic theologians and philosophers of religion. Mystical experiences, defined as strongly unitive, transcending everyday consciousness, and conveying epistemic certainty, plausibly imply one of two unpalatable conclusions for orthodox Christianity: either the experiences suggest metaphysical views that call key Christian tenets into question, or they represent an 'inner meaning' of Christianity that renders orthodox belief problematic, as evidenced in three Christian mystics discussed. The author concludes that Christian scholars have scarcely begun to ask the relevant questions.