Proudfoot

Religious Experience by Wayne Proudfoot (1987)

Religious Experience by Wayne Proudfoot (1987)

Proudfoot

This book seeks to answer questions such as:  How is religious experience to be identified, described, analyzed and explained?  Is it independent of concepts, beliefs, and practices?  How can we account for its authority?  Under what conditions might a person identify his or her experience as religious?

Wayne Proudfoot, a Columbia University Professor specializing in the philosophy of religion, aims to show that concepts, beliefs, and linguistic practices are presupposed by the rules governing this identification of an experience as religious.  Proudfoot contends that some of these characteristics can be understood by attending to the conditions of experience, among which are beliefs about how experience is to be explained.