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Renewing the senses: conversion experience and the phenomenology of the spiritual life

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Abstract

In his discussion of conversion experience, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James draws attention to a variety of experience which has not been much investigated in the philosophy of religion literature, but which seems to be of some importance religiously—namely, an experience which consists in a re-vivification of the sensory world as a whole. In this paper, I develop four accounts of the nature of this kind of experience, and I show how the experience can inform our conception of the spiritual life, considered as a world-directed mode of experience and practice.

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Correspondence to Mark Wynn.

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Wynn, M. Renewing the senses: conversion experience and the phenomenology of the spiritual life. Int J Philos Relig 72, 211–226 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-011-9293-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-011-9293-6

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