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Experiments with truth. A sociological variation on William James's Varieties of Religious Experience
Author(s) -
Vandenberghe Frédéric
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal for the theory of social behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.615
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5914
pISSN - 0021-8308
DOI - 10.1111/jtsb.12152
Subject(s) - variation (astronomy) , mysticism , sociology , epistemology , politics , philosophy , social science , law , theology , physics , astrophysics , political science
William James's Varieties of Religious Experience is a classic psycho‐philosophical study of the experience of the sacred and of its practical effects on the ordinary life of extraordinary persons. In a pragmatic variation of Kant's proof of god's existence, James uses personal accounts of converts to empirically demonstrate that there's “something” that has causal effects on the well‐being of the person. While the article is largely sympathetic to James explorations of the mystical, it offers a sociological variation on the Varieties that foregrounds the social, cultural and political aspects of religion.