Richard Swinburne’s Concept of Religious Experience. An Analysis and Critique

The so-called ”argument from religious experience’ plays a prominent role in today’s analytical philosophy of religion. It is also of considerable importance to richard Swinburne’s apologetic project. However, rather than joining the polyphonic debate around this argument, the present paper examines the fundamental concept of religious experience. The upshot is that Swinburne neither develops a convincing concept of experience nor explains what makes a religious experience religious. The first section examines some problems resulting mainly from terminology, specifically Swinburne’s use of appear-words as success-verbs. While these problems might be resolved by a recurrence to the observer, the second and third part of our paper present problems not so easily resolved: namely, that Swinburne’s concept of experience as conscious mental events is too broad and inaccurate for its role in the argument given ; and that Swinburne does not even attempt to figure out which features of an experience, when present, turn an experience simpliciter into a distinctly religious experience. Section 4, in conclusion, outlines possible reasons for this unusual and remarkable inaccuracy in conceptualisation

Why there is no fact of reason in the Groundwork : three arguments

Endless disagreements as to whether Kant defends this or that particular claim in this or that particular text have accompanied the work of Kant interpretation from the very beginning. Would one have to be regarded as disreputable and ill-disposed to think that these disagreements simply spring from the nature of the texts themselves? I think so. For while we cannot deny that there are different opinions about the question, for example, of whether Kant is already claiming the existence of a “fact of reason” in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (GMS) before he explicidy makes this claim in the Critique of Practical Reason (KpV), it would be a genetic fallacy to conclude from this that the question is unanswerable and simply arises from the unfathomable character of the texts

The deliverances of warranted Christian belief

After more than 2500 years of philosophy, it is very hard to leave a new and lasting trace in this perennial human enterprise. A pretty sure sign of such a trace is that people begin to wonder what exacdy it is that the philosopher claims. To ask such a question is to do historiography of philosophy; its task is not to figure out whether what is being claimed is true and whether how it is argued for is valid. Rather, the task is to decipher what is being claimed; after all, how are we to say whether a given proposition is true or an argument sound, if we don’t know what the proposition says or the argument is in the first place