Religious Experience and Metaphysics

This Reprint of the Special Issue of Religions entitled “Religious Experience and Metaphysics” includes reflections from nine established and beginning authors. This rich collection of essays places religious experience in the context of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s views on metaphysics, specifically, metaphysics of the transcendental absolute Being who may become available in immediate intuition. The collection includes reflections on Scheler, Derrida, Mamardashvili, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, whose views on the topic of religious experience and metaphysics are interpreted by the authors from the phenomenological standpoint. Other authors in this collection treat religious experience as such within first-person phenomenological reflection, addressing issues such as reduction, gift, the reading of the Gospels, and the boundaries between religious experience, the Absolute, and the world of things. While showing the broad spectrum of resources from phenomenology, the collection is not limited to the Eurocentric or Christian views, presenting papers authored by the Western, Eastern European, and Islamic thinkers.