My paper argues for the claim that religious experience may provide evidential reasons in support of religious beliefs. I name such a claim epistemic view of mystical experience (EM). In the first section, I sketch two approaches to EM. Swinburne, Alston and Plantinga (among others) develop a notable defense of EM. On the contrary, seminal works by Feuerbach and Bultmann offer the opposite account. I briefly show how to resist to the criticism of EM. In light of such line of (...) reasoning, I move to Alston's Theory of Doxastic Practices (TDP) in the second section. After giving a skeletal account of TDP, I construe an argument in Alstonian terms against the naturalist refutations of EM. In the third section, I highlight the main problem with TDP, that is, the claim that perceptions and religious experiences have an analogical relation. Examples from sacred texts of different traditions show that such a claim fails to grasp what a religious experience is. In the final section I give a preliminary account of the notion of presentational experience, and show that it is possible to defend EM more plausibly than TDP does by the use of this notion. (shrink)

The paper proposes a reflection on the meaning of “Christian ex- perience”, “encounter with God”, and the role of the philosophy of religion within humanistic disciplines. The essay starts with an anal- ysis of the notion of “experience” and through the studies of Romano Guardini, Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Dietrich von Hildebrand proposes a different perspective of a philosophy of religion, taking into account on one hand of the development of the sciences and on the other of (...) the philosophical-analytical method. In this sense this short research wants to be a sort of alarm bell to that theoreticism and abstractionism capable of rendering the philosophy of religion a sterile discipline, which is instead fruitful by definition. (shrink)