Phenomenology of Religion

In this paper, I present the two main proposals of Heidegger’s Introduction to the phenomenology of religion (1920/21): key methodological concepts for the idea of a hermeneutics of facticity and an analysis of original Christian religious experience as described by Paul of Tarsus. I aim to show that the application to Paul’s letters allows a better understanding and an illustration of these concepts (i. e. formal indication, three components of phenomena), and that important notions of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology draw an inspiration from these theological concepts. I make two final points about the relevance of Heidegger’s proposals for phenomenology of religion in a wider sense.

One of the most persistent and poignant human experiences is the sensation of longing—a restlessness perhaps best described as the unspoken conviction that something is missing from our lives. In this study, Drew M. Dalton attempts to illuminate this experience by examining the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas on longing, or what Levinas terms “metaphysical desire.”

Metaphysical desire, according to Levinas, does not stem from any determinate lack within us, nor does it aim at a particular object beyond us, much less promise any eventual satisfaction. Rather, it functions in the realm of the infinite where such distinctions as inside and outside or one and the other are indistinguishable, perhaps even eliminated. As Levinas conceives such longing, it becomes a mediator in our relation to the other—both the human other and the divine Other.

Dalton follows the meandering trail of Levinas’s thought along a series of dialogues with some of the philosophers within the history of the Western tradition who have most influenced his corpus. By tracing the genealogy of Levinas’s notion of metaphysical desire—namely in the works of Plato, Heidegger, Fichte, Schelling, and Otto—the nature of this Levinasian theme is elucidated to reveal that it is not simply an idealism, a “hagiography of desire” detached from actual experience and resulting in a disconnect between his phenomenological account and our own lives. Rather, Levinas’s account of metaphysical desire points to a phenomenology of human longing that is both an ethical and religious phenomenon. In the end, human longing is revealed to be one of the most profound ways in which a subject becomes a subject, arising to its “true self,” and hearing the call to responsibility placed upon it by the Other.

Throughout, Dalton explicates the nuance of a number of key Levinasian terms, many of which have been taken from the Western philosophical tradition and reinscribed with a new meaning. Eros, the “Good beyond being,” shame, responsibility, creation, the trace, the il y a, and the holy are discovered to be deeply tied to Levinas’s account of metaphysical desire, resulting in a conclusion regarding longing’s role in the relationship between the finite and the Infinite.

The mystical technique of imagery, i.e. visualizing an imaginary picture, found already in the earliest stages of Kabbalah, reached its peak in the teachings of R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of Piazecna (1889-1943). Academic interest in exploring mystical phenomena solely within their historical, social and political contexts has increased in recent years. This article challenges the exclusive quest for historicization in the study of Jewish mysticism, using R. Shapira's remarkable mystical-imagery techniques as a case study. Through employing the concepts of “empowerment” and “intensification” as a lens for the study of mysticism in world religions, this article argues that R. Shapira used imagery techniques as a method for empowerment in ritual, both nomian and anomian, in order to transform normative religious acts into mystical experiences. These imagery exercises are not simply one technique among many. Nor do they just function as an alternative to the experiences made possible by secularism in the early twentieth century, as have been claimed in studies based on historical readings of his works. Historical research that negates a phenomenological perspective impedes the scholar from observing a variety of important insights. R. Shapira used imagery techniques as a powerful tool for intensifying all religious practices, transforming ordinary rituals into encounters with the Divine.

The Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience invites submissions of high quality abstracts of 150-300 words for its group meeting at the Central APA. The APA is currently planning the Central Division meeting at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, IL, on February 23-26, 2022, with virtual backup plans. Abstracts should be anonymized and sent by email to apacentral@sophere.org before August 15 with the subject line “Central APA Submission”. Notifications of acceptance will be emailed by Aug 25. Paper presentation time should be no more than 20-30 minutes.

Religious/Spiritual Experience and Metaphysics
Sessions Co-Chairs: Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (UC Davis) and Andrew Oberg (University of Kochi)

In these two panels, we seek to address relationships between religious or spiritual experience (RSE) and metaphysics.
RSE are associated with interruptions in ordinary language/common sense experience of the everyday (cf. Dahl; Barber; Heidegger). RSE interruptions create specific changes in perception, but it is not clear if and how RSE phenomena as described by i.e. mystics (such as internal perception of light, sound, altered perception of the body (re: spatiality, density, depth, other parameters), internal stillness, motion, presence or disconnect, etc.) impact one’s beliefs and/or attendant metaphysical (pre)suppositions. Do RSE change empirical realism of the natural attitude, religious attitude, or one’s metaphysics of the self? In the first panel, we invite concrete empirical and textual investigations of relationships between the perceptual and conceptual aspects of RSE across different traditions. The papers can include both first person and second person descriptive phenomenological researches or an intertwining of different phenomenological analyses.
The second panel seeks revisionist metaphysical proposals that include a reference to formal phenomenological analyses of consciousness in RSE. By contrast with the ordinary experience of objects, originary self-giving in RSE can be non-associative, open-ended, undetermined; in other words, excluding mental or "real" (empirically so) objects. Therefore, a descriptive metaphysics of such consciousness needs to be non-object related (cf. Ladyman, French). What is the nature of reality “displayed” by RSE? Besides covering the metaphysics of consciousness, the panel welcomes speculative extensions of such phenomenologically grounded metaphysics into realist contexts, such as e.g., metaphysics of the quantum world or Minkowski space-time.
Contact: olouchakova@gmail.com

The doorway into continental phenomenology and the doorway into the understanding of the praxis of Dzogchen is our experiential focus on our awareness and our experiential lived experience within our innate experiential field  of our pre-reflective non conceptual knowingness of our own awareness. The innate awareness field is our direct knowingness of Being. The direct knowingness of our awareness is our primal openness to Being. Awareness is our  knowingness of Being. Heidegger called this knowingness
Da Sein. Our awareness knows Being non dualistically.

Our knowing of our awareness is distinct from our mind's knowing of phenomena and from our mind's knowing the appearance of phenomena, and the forms of  phenomena. Our mind knows subject and otherness. Our mind knows the essence of phenomena.. The distinction between our ordinary dualistic mind knowing of phenomenological forms and our primordial non dualistic non conceptual direct awareness of Being is of foundational importance in both Dzogchen and Existential Phenomenology.

Straipsnyje Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštijos šventųjų atvaizdų importo ir sklaidos procesas nagrinėjamas religijos fenomenologijos požiūriu. Remiantis konkrečiais objektų stebuklingumą liudijančiais diskursais, siekiama atskleisti stebuklo patirčių spektrą ir susidarančias įtampas savumo-kitybės bei pasyvumo-aktyvumo plotmėse. Tokiu būdu kultinis meno kūrinys išryškinamas kaip šventybės apraiška, o jį įtvirtinantys diskursai ir praktikos – kaip stebuklo lauko dalis. Keliama hipotezė, kad kultinio objekto importas yra ne tik viena iš religinių praktikų, kurios metu atsiranda įvairūs draudimai, tabu, bet kartu tai ženklina kertinius šventybės patirties momentus.

Christopher Buck, Review of Moojan Momen, The Phenomenon of Religion. Baha’i Studies Review 9 (1999): 93–99. [Introduces Buck’s “DREAMS Paradigm.” “DREAMS” is a mnemonic acronym for the Doctrinal, Ritual, Ethical, Artistic, Mystical, and Social dimensions of religion. Developed as a classroom tool (for university students) in formally comparing world religions.]

This paper addresses the issues of the descriptive phenomenological mode of accessing religious experience as neutralised and sympathetic. It tries to solve this problem by engaging with the descriptions of the self-understanding of religious attitudes and commitments. Edith Stein's consideration of Pseudo-Dionysius's "theology" serves as a case study, through which I demonstrate the way in which phenomenology can access a religious mode of experiencing and explicate its conditions and means, of being both concretely personal and also shareable across persons.

Note: this paper was to be delivered on 14 Mar 2020, at the Saint Damien Conference, KU Leuven (cancelled due to covid19).

Representing a new generation of phenomenologists in the so-called “theological turn,” Emmanuel Falque presses the boundary between theology and phenomenology in a more radical way than many of his predecessors. Despite his conviction that “the more one theologizes, the better one philosophizes,” he adopts a very different approach from other theological phenomenologists — beginning from the point of immanence and incarnation rather than transcendence and height. Falque thus reclaims the essential goodness of the human body, even in its finitude and limitations. This approach yields numerous problems, however, when maximized into a comprehensive system by creating a paradigmatic or normative phenomenological perspective grounded in the experience of “the human as such” (l’homme comme tel). Consequently, I argue for a minimalist reading of Falque’s phenomenology — one that seeks to preserve its various insights and benefits (especially in the realm of pastoral care) while avoiding the problems of a comprehensive “grand narrative” of theological phenomenology.

"Modificazioni di coscienza nell'esperienza della conversione" potrebbe essere un sottotitolo adeguato per questo testo, che si propone di affrontare con un approccio fenomenologico alcuni casi - più o meno celebri - di conversione. La trasversalità di queste esperienze nella Storia rende possibile tracciarne un profilo, pur sottolineando le profonde differenze generate da contesti culturali, sociali ed economici eterogenei. Come capitolo di un'opera più ampia, questo testo non mira ad esaurire l'argomento, ma proporre una prospettiva che riconosca alla coscienza un carattere composito e mutevole, capace di dialogare con le contingenze storiche e reagire ad esse in maniera anche drastica. 

Riprodotto da: N.Martellozzo. Esperienza della conversione. In:
E.Casiglia. Trattato d'ipnosi e altre modificazioni di coscienza. CLEUP, Padova, 2015 (pag. 879-905), con autorizzazione del detentore del copyright.

"Pour rendre hommage à mon Maître, je veux aujourd’hui interpréter quelques pages de son grand livre sur La Joie spacieuse, afin de dégager le type de phénoménologie qui était le sien, pleinement inscrit dans le projet phénoménologique inauguré par l’invention husserlienne de l’intentionnalité. L’intentionnalité de Chrétien est une intentionnalité paradoxale, surplombée et gouvernée par l’excès de ce qui se donne au sujet, mais où le sujet a à son tour la capacité  d’accueillir, dans et par la joie, cet excès qui se donne, et qui se donne à lui. Ce n’est pas tant une faculté qu’une disposition affective, la joie, qui permet la dilatation de l’âme de telle sorte qu’elle accueille ce qu’elle ne peut pas accueillir, qu’elle reçoit ce qu’elle ne peut pas recevoir. Alors, la phénoménologie est le lieu paradoxal de la réconciliation de l’intériorité et de l’extériorité, du fini et de l’infini, que la joie assemble dans leur infinie séparation, séparation qui se trouve in fine vaincue par la phénoménalité même. C’est une figure positive de ce qu’on peut appeler « psycho-théologie », c’est-à-dire la possibilité dialectique de l’accueil dans l’intériorité de l’infinie transcendance, malgré et dans la séparation. Or je voudrais poser à Chrétien la question suivante, à partir de Kant : n’y a-t-il pas, plus profondément dans la phénoménalité, une idée de Dieu plus ancienne, qui a toujours précédé la joie spacieuse, qui rend l’intériorité malade de son infinité et qui coupe l’intentionnalité à sa racine, qui soit de la non intentionnalité à la racine de l’intentionnalité, une pathologie où seule l’angoisse, avant la joie, peut répondre, et que Levinas, après Schelling, avait dû bien finir par entrevoir dans Autrement qu’être ? En objectant ainsi le traumatisme originaire et non intentionnel de l’idée de Dieu, au prix d’une spéculation difficile, je souhaite mettre au jour par contraste la dimension phénoménologique de la pensée de Chrétien, l’hymne à la joie qui la soutient et qui ne l’a fait jamais rompre, en fait, avec la doctrine husserlienne de l’intentionnalité."

This chapter offers a phenomenological analysis of the nature of psychiatric illness and religious commitment, focusing upon a set of neglected affective states called 'existential feelings'. After offering an account of existential feeling and their role in shaping experience, thought, and activity, it is argued that both psychiatric illness and religious commitment ought to be understood in terms of altered existential feeling. Since existential feelings lie beyond the scope of empirical enquiry, it follows that the task of understanding psychiatric illness and religious commitment is fundamentally phenomenological rather than neuroscientific.

The experiential language and the experiential view of Contemporary Phenomenology is amazingly similar to the language and view of the ancient Tibetan Meditative Tradition of Dzogchen. Both Dzogchen and Contemporary Phenomenology understand that the unfolding of the lived experience of self-liberation happens through our direct lived experience of Innate Awareness. Moreover, our lived experience of Innate Awareness is our Direct Lived Experience of Primordial Being.
Both Contemporary Phenomenology and Dzogchen are phenomenological ontological philosophical traditions. A metaphysical tradition is the thinking of Being mentally and conceptually. A phenomenological ontological tradition is the direct lived experiencing of phenomenological Being and the artful experiential articulation of the lived experience of phenomenological Being personally and symbolically.
Both Phenomenology and Dzogchen dramatically understand that in becoming aware of our own awareness we directly experience the field of Luminous Being. Both traditions in their historical unfolding understanding the we have two ways of knowing. The knowing of our mind  knows phenomena and the knowing of our awareness knows Being.

De fenomenologische methode heeft vaste grond gevonden in de humaniora. Eerst vooral in de godsdienstwetenschap (Philipps-Universität Marburg en rug) en psychiatrie ( Albert Ludwig Universität Freiburg en uu) en het agnostisch humanisme. In 1923 publiceerde H. C. Rümke zijn dissertatie Phaenomenologisch en klinisch-psychiatrisch onderzoek over geluksgevoel. In 1933 verscheen in Tübingen het magnum opus van de Groningse hoogleraar Gerardus van der Leeuw Phänomenologie der Religion. Zowel Rümke als Van der Leeuw hebben een blijvende invloed verworven in de Nederlandse cultuurgeschiedenis.
Fragmenten uit het archief zijn terug te vinden in onze fenomenologische publicaties. Het belang zou er in kunnen schuilen dat steeds gepoogd is om alle begrippen zo helder mogelijk te duiden en in verschillende verbanden te bezien. Altijd handig voor studenten en belangstellenden. Op de eerste plaats is het ons er om te doen geweest het antwoord van Einstein op Freuds nihilisme te verwezenlijken: emancipatie vanuit de traditie, geen abrupt alles opeens anders doen.
Hoe actueel wil je het hebben? De geïnstitutionaliseerde religie is in diskrediet gebracht, maar niet het religieuze zoeken dat weigert genoegen te nemen met triviale rituelen van macht en uitbuiting als uitdrukkingen van zingeving. Religie in overgeleverde vorm heeft voor ons afgedaan. Het zoeken naar de zin van het bestaan is gebleven. Einstein: ‘Ik ben een diep religieuze ongelovige’.

Статья посвящена исследованию значения тела в реорганизуемой практикой «Духовных упражнений»
жизни подвязующегося. Анализ значения основывается на пояснении прагматики практики, ее структуры, а также отличительных черт. Так, проводится последовательное пояснение каждого из четырех этапов, благодаря которому раскрывается роль тела на каждом из них. Исходя из этого, подчеркивается то фундаментальное положение, которое занимает телесность в реорганизуемой жизни практикующего, а также важность данного аспекта для исследования наследия Игнатия Лойолы.

In the hills of China’s central Hunan province, an anxious young apprentice officiates over a
Daoist ritual known as the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin. Before a crowd of masters,
relatives, and villagers―and the entire pantheon of gods and deceased masters ritually invited to
witness the event―he seeks to summon Celestial Lord Yin Jiao, the ferocious deity who supplies
the exorcistic power to protect and heal bodies and spaces from illness and misfortune. If the
apprentice cannot bring forth the deity, the rite is considered a failure and the ordination
suspended: His entire professional career hangs in the balance before it even begins.

This richly textured study asks how the Banner Rite works or fails to work in its own terms. How
do the cosmological, theological, and anthropological assumptions ensconced in the ritual itself
account for its own efficacy or inefficacy? Weaving together ethnography, textual analysis,
photography, and film, the book invites readers into the religious world of ritual masters in
today’s south China. It shows that the efficacy of rituals such as the Banner Rite is driven by the
ability of a ritual master to form an intimate relationship with exorcistic deities such as Yin Jiao,
which is far from guaranteed. The book reveals the ways in which these ritual claims are rooted
in the great liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368) and how they are
performed these days amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era.

Written for students and scholars of Chinese religion and Daoism, Knotting the Banner will also
appeal to anthropologists and comparative religionists, especially those working on ritual.

Nicholas of Cusa’s deployment of an omnivoyant image in the De visione Dei has been said to deconstruct Leon Battista Alberti’s mathematical determination of space in single-point linear perspective. While there has been some debate over whether the omnivoyant functions like a medieval icon or instead like a Renaissance painting, what has been neglected is a more careful analysis of what underlies the very structure of omnivoyance, namely the milieu from which its contradictions and paradoxes emerge. In this article, I will show how thinking the milieu of vision, implicit in Cusa’s optics, lets us overcome any overly simple binaries in these debates and deepen our understanding of the meaning of omnivoyance.

The maskilic characterization of the nineteenth century as a period of decline and ossification for Hasidism is increasingly eschewed by scholars, yet continues to mark current research in significant ways. As a case study, this article takes up Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn of Lubavitch ("Maharash," 1834-1882), rescrutinizing (1) the controversy surrounding the onset of his leadership, (2) his personality and charisma, (3) his methodological approach to the teachings and texts that he inherited from his predecessors, and (4) his theological contributions and their place in the broader trajectory of Chabad's intellectual history. His tenure emerges as a false twilight, in which a new foundation was laid for the perpetuation and expansion of Chabad-Lubavitch, as both an intellectual and activist movement, in the century that followed.

Muslim religious leaders and scholars lectured on the higher goals of peace in Islam by defining the goals with scripture and hadith, with prophetic sayings and actions, and with attempting to demonstrate that peace is a pillar of the faith. Ironically, with the rise of violence in Muslim global communities, we have witnessed a surge of publications, podcasts, social media, and organizations dedicated to peacemaking. Muslim religious leaders (imams) and scholars ('ulama) recognize their important roles they play in reinforcing pluralism within Islam worldwide.

Este artículo describe fenomenológicamente nuestra situación ontológica y nuestros dos modos de conocimiento. Existe el conocimiento de la mente como el conocedor de las formas y el conocedor de la conciencia como el conocedor del Ser. Este documento vincula e integra la visión tántrica Dzogchen de la distinción mente-conciencia con la visión fenomenológica europea de los siglos XIX y XX de la distinción mente-conciencia expresada en el trabajo de Heidegger y Merleau Ponty. Esta distinción de mente y conciencia nos permite aclarar la confusión sobre nuestro conocimiento de las formas y nuestro conocimiento del Ser. El artículo enfatiza el entrelazamiento de la conciencia y la mente. Cuando la mente y la conciencia están en unidad, el conocedor puede conocer el Ser del ser a través de un ser. La persona puede conocer la dualidad de los seres dentro de la no dualidad del Ser. Y la persona puede conocer la no dualidad del Ser dentro de la dualidad de los seres.

Citation:
Buck, Christopher. “Ninian Smart (1927–2001).” British Writers, Supplement XXIV. Ed. Jay Parini. Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons/The Gale Group, 2018. Pp. 269–283. ISBN-13: 978-0684325156. (Release date: September 8, 2017.)

ABSTRACT

ACADEMICS IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES have a long- standing joke. Question: “What is the difference between Ninian Smart and God?” Answer: “God is everywhere. Ninian Smart is everywhere but here!” (Ninian Smart on World Religions, p. xxi). That one-liner about Smart’s ubiquity attests not only to the reach of his publications but also to his international influence in the emergence of the scholarly field of religious studies—first and foremost in Britain and, more widely, in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Almost single-handedly, Ninian Smart “founded the academic study of religion in Britain” and “gave intellectual structure and shape to the field in the rest of the English-speaking world, especially the U.S.A.,” according to Jacob Neusner (“Remembering Ninian Smart,” pp. 355–356). Yet Smart was far more than an academic. In writing books about philosophy and world religions, he was steeped in deep thought, immersed in higher thinking. Human and social values were his subject matter. He compared cultures, religions, philosophies, and political ideologies such as Marxism and Maoism. His own thinking about Buddhist enlightenment, Confucian order, Taoist freedom, Hindu liberation, Christian salvation, and so forth produced a wonderful, if not exotic, synthesis. He could see the full picture, understand human dilemmas, and propose global orientations in solutions that were simple, yet profound. A gentleman and a scholar in every sense, Smart was a down-to-earth man but a noble soul, with a grand vision of the world and the direction he believed that it needed to take. …

Despite his Scottish flourishes—eating his porridge with salt and pepper, and occasionally donning his kilt and tartan—Ninian Smart was humanitarian and universal. He presented a vision and version of Christianity that could seriously engage with the fact of religious pluralism and operate in an entirely secular mode as well. Smart was fond of joking: “Comparative religion will make you comparatively religious” (quoted in Strenski, “Ninian Smart and the Overcoming of Philosophy,” p. 369). He recognized wisdom and insight in various religious and cultural settings, and he broke free entirely of parochial presumptions. In that regard, he was both theologian and academic. Ninian Smart, almost single-handedly, was instrumental in institutionalizing the academic study of religion. The entire discipline is indebted to his leadership and legacy.

Now available in the Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) database.

In the late Middle Ages the philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that to know the truth you must be the truth. But how to be the truth? Eckhart’s answer comes in the form of an imperative: release yourself, let be. Only then will you be able to understand that the deepest meaning of being is releasement. Only then will you become who you truly are. This book interprets Eckhart’s Latin and Middle High German writings under the banner of an imperative of releasement, and then shows how the twentieth-century thinker Martin Heidegger creatively appropriates this idea at several stages of his career. Regardless of whether Heidegger is promoting the will or, like Eckhart, letting-be, the mood of Heidegger’s discourse, from beginning to end, is imperative. Experience is all.

Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement does not just offer a novel way to read Eckhart and Heidegger, though. It also carefully examines Heidegger’s lifelong fascination with “the old master of letters and life,” as Heidegger liked to refer to his German predecessor. Drawing on archival material and Heidegger’s marginalia in his personal copies of Eckhart’s writings, this book argues that Eckhart was one of the most important figures in Heidegger’s philosophy. The book also contains previously unpublished documents by Heidegger on Eckhart, as well as the first English translation of Nishitani Keiji’s seminal essay “Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart,” which he initially gave as a presentation in one of Heidegger’s classes in 1938.

We have two ways of knowing. Our mind knows forms, things, both subtle and gross. Faces, hands, buildings, trees, math formulas, mind knows subject and the mind knows otherness. The mind knows dualities, the mind knows me and you, us and them, and this and that. Mind knows time, mind knows the past, the present and the sense of the future. The mind knows things and entities, the mind knows beings, infinite numbers of beings and things. The mind knows difference. The mind thinks conceptually, feels affectively, imagines through imagery, the mind has sense and the mind has memory. The mind knows dualistically.

The question of the relation between religious experience and Christian belief in God is addressed in radically different ways within contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. In order to develop an answer which avoids the pitfalls of the ‘analytic perception model’ (Alston, Yandell, Swinburne) and the ‘overlinguistic’ model for interpreting Christian religious experience (Lindbeck), this thesis offers an approach which combines a phenomenological study of feelings, conceptual investigation of Christian God-talk and ‘belief’-talk, as well as theological, sociological and anthropological perspectives. At the centre of the interpretation developed here is the phenomenological category ‘existential feelings’ which should be seen, it is suggested, as a theologically and philosophically central aspect of Christian religious experiencing. Using this contemporary concept, a novel reading of F. Schleiermacher’s concept of ‘feeling’ is proposed and several kinds of Christian experiencing interpreted (like the experiences of ‘awe’, ‘miracle of existence’, ‘wretchedness’, and ‘redeemed community’). By way of a philosophical understanding of Christian believing in God, this study offers a critical interpretation of the later Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘religious belief’, combining Wittgensteinian insights with Paul Tillich’s notion of ‘dynamic faith’ and arguing against Wittgensteinian ‘grammaticalist’ and ‘expressivist’ accounts. Christian beliefs about God are normally life-guiding but nevertheless dubitable. The nature of Christian God-talk is interpreted, again, by combining the later Wittgenstein’s insights into the grammatical and expressive roles of God-talk with Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on linguistic innovation and Roman Jakobson’s perspective on the functions of language. Finally, the claim which connects phenomenological, conceptual and theological strands of this study is a recognition of a ‘religious belief-inviting pull’ of the relevant experience. Christian religious belief-formation and concept-formation can be seen as stemming from ‘extraordinary’ existential feelings, where the resulting beliefs about God are largely but not completely bound by traditional meanings.

Introduction
1. Phenomenology of Existential Feelings Within a
Broader Philosophical Context
2. Schleiermacher’s ‘Gefühl’ as Existential Feeling
3. Wittgenstein, Belief-Attitudes, and ‘Hinge-
Certainty’
4. Beyond the Wittgensteinian Grammaticalist View
of Religious Belief
5. The Expressive Among the Functions of Language
6. God-talk, Feelings and Beliefs
Conclusion

Online: https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/10262