Document Type : Research

Author

• Alireza Kermani

Associate Professor of Mysticism, Faculty Member of Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute, Qom, Iran

Abstract

In the modern era, after the weakening of theoretical rationality, religious experience became the center of attention of many philosophers of religion. Among the topics that these philosophers showed great interest in is the nature of religious experience and its validity. For example, Schleiermacher and Otto considered religious experience to be a feeling associated with consciousness, and Alston and Swinburne tried to validate it by expressing its similarity with sensory experience. The book "Elements of the Philosophy of Religion: Religious Experience", after a brief overview of some views on the nature of religious experience and explaining the perceptual approach to prove the validity of religious experiences and the challenges facing them, is based on the fact that such discussions about religious experience are based on a knowledge-centered approach in the philosophy of religion; An approach that, by creating limitations in the definition of religious experience and its exclusivity in certain experiences, only seeks to discover the correspondence of these experiences with reality. But the author considers it necessary to complement this knowledge-centered approach with an understanding- centered approach. The understanding-centered approach considers the development of religious man's understanding to be much more important than the discovery of correspondence with reality, and it is based on the philosophy of religion that it is necessary to be oriented towards the development of the subject and the expansion of his understanding.

Keywords

• Religious Experience
• Philosophy of Religion
• Mystical Experience
• Knowledge
• Faith

Main Subjects

• Philosophy