1st Edition

Ineffability and Religious Experience

By Guy Bennett-Hunter Copyright 2014

    Ineffability – that which cannot be explained in words – lies at the heart of the Christian mystical tradition. This is the first book to engage with the concept of ineffability within contemporary philosophy of religion and provides a starting point for further scholarly debate.

    Introduction: Philosophy of Religion in the New Style; Chapter 1 Ineffability and Religion; Chapter 2 Philosophical Defence of the Concept of Ineffability; Chapter 3 Two Attempts at Theological Appropriation; Chapter 4 Karl Jaspers’s Philosophical Position; Chapter 5 The Nature of Philosophical Evocation of the Ineffable; Chapter 6 The Aesthetic and Ritual Embodiment of the Ineffable;

    Biography

    Guy Bennett-Hunter

    “This book is badly needed in a rather unusual sense because it attends to such a neglected topic. Philosophers have long concentrated on linguistic forms in a way that has isolated language from the rest of life. And this isolation has increasingly obscured for them the vast range of things that cannot be spoken. During the last century, too, English-speaking analytic philosophy has carried this isolation to disastrous lengths on various topics, but above all in the philosophy of religion. Bennett-Hunter is not the first philosopher to try and map this distracted field, but he is remarkable in the width of his approach and his sympathetic approach to the highly various thinkers whom he invokes to illuminate it.” --Mary Midgley