RT Article
T1 MYSTICISM, LANGUAGE AND TRUTH
JF Journal of Dharma
VO 35
IS 3
SP 259
OP 275
A1 Karuvelil, George
LA English
PB Dharmaram College
YR 2010
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1837807132
AB Ever since Friedrich Schleiermacher addressed the "cultured despisers" of his time by turning to religious experience, experience has come to occupy a central place (if not the central place) in philosophy of religion. He attempted to show that the truth of religion does not consist in the externals that they despised but in an inner experience. With the linguistic turn of philosophy in the twentieth century, the linguistic dimension of experience came to the forefront. But there is a palpable tension between these linguistic and truth dimensions of religious experience such that any overemphasis on one puts the other in jeopardy. This is clearly seen in the philosophy of Steven Katz who emphasizes language, and thereby putting religious truth at risk. The opposite tendency is seen in Walter Stace. Examining their theories will show that a theory of religious experience, if it is to hold on to both these dimensions, must be such as to make religious experiences logically identifiable and the theory of experience empirically adequate. Together, I shall call them the experiential imperatives.
K1 Language
K1 Mysticism
K1 Truth