Jan Seibert
Justus-Liebig-Universität (JLU) Gießen
Many people are clearly and without a doubt religious in their acting and cognizing. However, it is unclear what exactly this feature of religiousness philosophically speaking amounts to. For example, it might be tempting to define religiousness in terms of essential beliefs that are suitable to guide actions in various contexts. But while some religious people might worship a monotheistic god of a certain sort or even a plurality of gods, others may merely believe in the existence of immortal souls, ancestral spirits, or some form of reincarnation, while others again will perhaps just worship nature in itself or some kind of impersonal cosmic order.
Against the backdrop of this problem of content plurality, another strategy to tackle what religiousness amounts to can be expressed by reference to the experiences that religious people make. However, since those experiences seem no less diverse than the beliefs religious people possess, this approach would have to be developed in a unifying way that avoids the difficulties of a doxastic understanding of religiousness as mentioned above.
In my presentation, I will argue that a unifying way to philosophically explain the apparent plurality of experiences that religious people make is to construe it as a plurality of ways to structure the content of a specific kind of experience that we can call religious experience. Using ideas of the early Friedrich Schleiermacher, I will claim that religious experiences are contemplative experiences of the totality of being. This understanding of religious experiences presents an alternative to how religious experiences are epistemologically thought about in the more contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Furthermore, it has systematic advantages: It can construe religious plurality in terms of different ways to experience the totality of being, it stays neutral to metaphysical and moral debates such as whether there is a god whose laws we should obey, and it allows for an account of how religious intuitions and religious emotions relate to one another as well as of why religiousness and art often go hand in hand.
Even though understanding religiousness in terms of contemplative experience also bears revisionary potential, I will discuss how more doxastic elements of religious people’s lives can be reintegrated into this picture.
Chair: Fabio Tollon
Time: September 8th, 10:00-10:30
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 