Abstract
The graphic reports in the last chapter of a Reality breaking in upon some people’s consciousness inevitably underscore the truth that others never have experiences of this kind. Many committed theists, perhaps, are unaware of any single occasion upon which “knowledge of God” was given to them, but the strength with which they hold their convictions is not less than those for whom some experience is epiphanic. The former are people who have always been theists, and know of no time in their lives when they were unsure of this belief. Intuitive knowledge is seemingly present in both experiences—the mundane and the dramatic—and the value of the dramatic experiences lies in their capacity not only to attract our attention, but also to allow the mundane states of mind to be more clearly seen for what they possibly are. Spiritual communities often include people whose dramatic experiences are not shared by others, and each group is suspicious of the other. In his groundbreaking work on religious experience, William James speaks of the “once-born” and the “twice-born” as a way of caricaturing the two.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
William James (1960) The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Collins), lec. 6 & 7.
Sir David Ross (1930) The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press), Chapter 2.
Charles Taylor (2007) A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), pp. 191–92.
Derek Parfit (1984) Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Appendix I.
Immanuel Kant (1993) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 3rd edn [1785] (trans. James W. Ellington) (Indianapolis: Hackett). pref.
David Hume (1967) A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigg (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press), bk. 3, pt. 1, sec. 1.
The existence of a fact–value gap is a different matter than the inability to deduce an evaluative statement from a factual one, according to Julian Dodd, and Suzanne Stern-Gilley (1995) “The Is/Ought Gap, the Fact/Value Distinction and the Naturalistic Fallacy,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 34, 727–45.
John Mackie (1977) Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books), p. 15.
Sir A. J. Ayer (1946) Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd edn (London: Gollancz), is the best-known English exposition of positivism, which construes value judgments as having only emotive and/or prescriptive meaning.
Terence Cuneo (2003) “Reidian Moral Perception,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 33, 229–58.
See the defense of the cognitivity of theological statements in Theodore M. Drange (2005) “Is ‘God Exists’ Cognitive?” Philo: A Journal of Philosophy, 8, 137–50. This contradicts the famous positivist position on the topic, as in A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic.
Carl Wellman (1968) “Emotivism and Ethical Objectivity,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 5, 90–99, concurs, published a decade later.
Positivism is evidently being reexamined, cf. Michael Friedman (1999) Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Del Kiernan-Lewis (2007) “Naturalism and the Problem of Evil,” Philo: A Journal of Philosophy, 10, 125–35. A curious dilemma arises: either no evaluative facts exist, in which case the standard theistic explanations of creation fail, or such facts exist, in which case the problem of evil arises. I take it that theists should embrace such facts, and the problem of evil.
Gilbert Harman (1977) The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press), Chapter 1.
Cf. Don Dedrick (1995) “Objectivism and the Evolutionary Value of Colour Vision,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 34, 35–44.
See Vladimir Ilich (1966) The Emancipation of Women; From the Writings of V. I. Lenin (New York: International Publishers) for his articulation of the social and political equality of women as early as 1920.
David Hume (1966) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 2nd edn, reprint of 1777 edn (LaSalle, IL: Open Court), sec. 9, pt. 1.
Rene Descartes (1960) Meditations on First Philosophy in Which are Demonstrated the Existence of God and the Distinction Between the Human Soul and Body (trans. Laurence J. LaFleur) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill), meditation 2.
See Jasper Reid (2003) “Henry More on Material and Spiritual Extension,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 42, 531–58.
Carl Jung (1996) The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932, Sonu Shamdasani (ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 21.
Daniel Dennett (1992) “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” in Frank S. Kessel, Pamela Cole, and Dale L. Johnson (eds.) Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum), pp. 103–15.
Aristotle, Politics, in Richard McKeon (ed.) The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1341a.
Gazzaniga has published widely on his research, including Michael S. Gazzaniga (1988) Mind Matters: How Mind and Brain Interact to Create our Conscious Lives (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
W. M. Kelley, C. N. Macrae, C. L. Wyland, S. Caglar, S. Inati, and T. F. Heathertont (2002) “Finding the Self? An Event-Related fMRI Study,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 785–94.
Phillip H. Wiebe (1997) Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 85.
Plato, Republic in Francis M. Cornford (1945) (ed. and trans.) The Republic of Plato (London: Oxford University Press), p. 439.
Merton, Thomas (2003) The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation, William H. Shannon (ed.) (New York: HarperCollins Publishers), p. 10; ital. orig.
Plato, Phaedo, in B. Jowett (trans.) The Dialogues of Plato, 2 vols (New York: Random House, 1937), 78c.
I have discussed this in Wiebe, Visions of Jesus, pp. 95–98; cf. Carol Zaleski (1996) The Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 58–64.
Aristotle, De Anima, in Richard McKeon (ed.) The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), bk. 2, chap. 2ff.
See Karol Wojtyla (1979) The Acting Person: A Contribution to Phenomenological Anthropology (trans. Analecta Husserliana, and Andrezej Potocki) (Berlin: Springer), which reflects influences of Thomism, existentialism, and phenomenology. I owe this insight to Kian O’Higgins.
See Robert L. Vance (2006) “Moral Being in Contemporary Views of the Self,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 45, 713–29, for a discussion of recent analyses of the self.
Carl Jung (1972) Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (trans. R. F. C. Hull) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Perhaps a causal link does exist, but not one explicable only in physical terms.
These were explored a half-century ago in Carl G. Hempel (1943) “A Purely Syntactical Definition of Confirmation,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 8, 122–43,
and Carl Hempel (1965) “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,” in Carl Hempel (ed.) Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: The Free Press), pp. 3–46.
Copyright information
© 2015 Phillip H. Wiebe
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wiebe, P.H. (2015). Values. In: Intuitive Knowing as Spiritual Experience. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543585_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543585_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56404-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54358-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)