Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
1.3
0.6
Journals
Religions
Special Issues
Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition
share announcement

Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Humanities/Philosophies".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2026) | Viewed by 8637

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Olga Louchakova-Schwartz

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Religion, Culture, and Society, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA
Interests: religious experience; comparative phenomenology and philosophy of religion; illuminationism; Vedanta; Husserl
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Michael D. Barber

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Philosophy, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO 63108, USA
Interests: phenomenology; social philosophy; philosophy of religion; philosophy and race

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This is an updated call for the “Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition” Issue of Religions. The submission deadline is now extended to December 31, 2025, and some new themes have now been added to the research topic.

In this Special Issue, we discuss the phenomenology of intuition in the experiences which cannot be linked (genetically or constitutively) to the real mind-independent object. The topic of this Issue is inspired by the reports of intuition in religious or spiritual contexts, or, conversely to religion, by intuitions which predict or even describe realities of quantum physics or molecular biology. If we consider intuition in a Husserlian sense, as a fulfilled cognition, what fulfils the intentionality of consciousness in such experiences? We welcome papers on objectivating consciousness and intuition which posits the reality of non-objects, things which by their nature cannot be seen as objects, whether large or small.

Husserl’s phenomenology defines intuition as sensory, eidetic, or categorial (Kidd 2014). How, whether, and what can these kinds of intuition engage? Searle (2005) famously insists that the scope of phenomenology is limited by the visible, but according to Merleau-Ponty, one finds that the presentation of the visible depends constitutively on the invisible. Capra (2010) and Kaiser (2011) reported many cases when intuitions in religious or spiritual experience were at play in shaping scientific concepts; and in a recent book, MacKendrick (2021) suggests that flesh (a primary “non-object”) serves as a ground of religious concepts across traditions. When the experience concerns in-principle-invisible non-objects, how does intuition operate?

This Issue welcomes both concrete reports and forward-going imaginative papers concerning the origins and mechanisms of intuition in the experiences which cannot be linked to ordinary objects. As known in phenomenology, accomplishments of consciousness include the way of building intuition on itself. How can such intuition be veridical? We seek “profound descriptive categorizations, which will give us some insight into essentially different constitution of sensuous and categorial percepts (or intuitions in general)” (Husserl 2001, 282). The differences in the constitution of intuition are at work not only in religious or spiritual experience, or in experiences of physical non-objects, but also in liminal conditions such as dying, transitions between awakening and sleep, in lucid dreaming, remote viewing, etc. Would such cognitions count as perception? Does intuition have a limit? Conversely, can intuition be a phenomenologically wider and more universal tool than is defined by the notion of an object?  

We invite papers containing phenomenological (eidetic) descriptions and interpretations of intuition in the experiences of non-objects. First- or second-person approaches, and concrete and a priori research are all welcome. The papers will be given a priority if they contain intercultural comparisons or references to embodiment. 

References

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2010.

Kaiser, David. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Kidd, Chad. "Husserl's Phenomenological Theory of Intuition." In Rational Intuition, edited by Lisa M. Osbeck, and Barbara S. Held, 131-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Translated by John N. Findlay. 2 vols. Vol. II, London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

MacKendrick, Karmen. Material Mystery: The Flesh of the World in Three Mythic Bodies. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.

Searle, John R. "The Phenomenological Illusion." In Experience and Analysis: Proceedings of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 8th to 14th August 2004, Kirchberg Am Wechsel (Austria), edited by Johann Christian Marek Maria E. Reicher, 317-34. Vienna: ÖBV & HPT, 2005.

Prof. Dr. Olga Louchakova-Schwartz
Prof. Dr. Michael D. Barber
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • God
  • subatomic particles
  • subjectivity
  • intuition
  • inwardness
  • religious cognition
  • Kant
  • Husserl
  • Merleau-Ponty
  • Henry

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (7 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

15 pages, 262 KB  
Article
Intuition Without Objects Phenomenology, Futurity and Responsibility
by Riccardo Valenti
Religions 2026, 17(3), 335; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17030335 - 6 Mar 2026
Viewed by 650
Abstract
This article investigates how intuition operates when its referent is structurally absent or non-objectifiable. While phenomenology has traditionally linked intuition to fulfilment and object-givenness, a growing range of contemporary experiences, such as climate change, future generations, and technologically mediated processes, resist such modes [...] Read more.
This article investigates how intuition operates when its referent is structurally absent or non-objectifiable. While phenomenology has traditionally linked intuition to fulfilment and object-givenness, a growing range of contemporary experiences, such as climate change, future generations, and technologically mediated processes, resist such modes of presentation in principle. Their absence is not contingent but structural. The article argues that phenomenology can nonetheless account for these experiences by articulating a mode of intuition that does not depend on presentable objects, but arises through mediation, temporal articulation, and responsiveness. Drawing on Husserl’s analyses of intuition and temporality, the first part identifies the limits of object-centred accounts of evidence in contexts characterized by mediation and diachronic dispersion. The second part turns to Levinas, whose account of diachrony and responsibility discloses a relation to the future that is ethically binding without being anticipable or reciprocable. The third part elaborates this insight through Waldenfels’s phenomenology of the alien and of responsiveness, showing how experience is structured by pathos, delay, and asymmetry. Here, intuition without objects appears not as a lack of evidence, but as a specific mode of experiential articulation grounded in interruption and answerability. The article concludes by showing how this phenomenological reconstruction clarifies central problems in contemporary climate ethics, particularly those concerning intergenerational responsibility. It suggests that what is often described as a motivational or institutional deficit can also be understood as a failure to recognize a distinctive intuitive relation to the future, i.e., one that binds without presenting and calls for response despite structural absence. In doing so, the notion of intuition without objects contributes to broader reflections on temporality, responsibility, and ethical agency under conditions of deep temporal asymmetry. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition)
18 pages, 264 KB  
Article
Post-Linguistic Acts and the Worshiped Invisible
by Mitchell Atkinson
Religions 2026, 17(3), 307; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17030307 - 2 Mar 2026
Viewed by 303
Abstract
For communities on the margins of hostile or indifferent power structures, the political order can be experienced as a force whose acts are not motivated by reasons in accord with recognizable norms. Power, then, as a social phenomenon, is naturalized in the sense [...] Read more.
For communities on the margins of hostile or indifferent power structures, the political order can be experienced as a force whose acts are not motivated by reasons in accord with recognizable norms. Power, then, as a social phenomenon, is naturalized in the sense that it is dehumanized. Derrida explored some of this territory in his final seminar, the Beast and the Sovereign. Power becomes a latent animality, structuring social life as it removes itself from mechanisms of accountability. At the same time, the Black church ritual, in the United States and elsewhere, provides an experience of a self-sustaining power, whose invisibility is taken as coextensive with its omnipresence. The act of worship becomes a project of counter-habituation whereby power can be constituted as just and life-affirming. Simone Weil’s spiritual writings on the necessity of God’s love can be of some assistance here, but her concern with “decreation” is on its face a self-erasing theological enterprise, the sociopolitical implications of which would seem to put it at odds with a movement, among marginalized people, toward increased recognition. A look at the relation between Weil’s writing method—which I analyze as a kind of endophrasis—and Edmund Husserl’s transcendental understanding of the self provides a way to reorganize our understanding of the sociocultural project supported by the ritual. To grasp the counter-habituating project of the ritual, we must see it as founded in non-linguistic thinking and post-linguistic acts. These acts are, in part, improvisational, which is a key to habituating the recognition of higher-order necessity through free activity. They bring the worshiper “through” culturally determined linguistic acts to another kind of experience, in which the freedom to worship an invisible God is manifest. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition)
22 pages, 334 KB  
Article
“Existence Without Existents”: On Levinas’s Concerns About Beauty as an Expression of the Sacred and Its Complex Relationship with the Holy
by Matthew Coate
Religions 2026, 17(2), 216; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17020216 - 11 Feb 2026
Viewed by 463
Abstract
In a certain sense, the experience of beauty is objectless. Obviously, only in a certain sense: for the experience evidently makes some objects manifest—namely, the object found beautiful. Yet to find an object beautiful means finding that it somehow, given the juxtaposition of [...] Read more.
In a certain sense, the experience of beauty is objectless. Obviously, only in a certain sense: for the experience evidently makes some objects manifest—namely, the object found beautiful. Yet to find an object beautiful means finding that it somehow, given the juxtaposition of its material elements, expresses something beyond conception, which thus directs us towards something that could never be given as an object of experience. Kant thus claimed that beauty ultimately expresses the purportedly supersensible basis of all being, accounting for the sense of meaningfulness and repose engendered by the experience of beauty. Levinas, expanding on such ideas, calls this an expression of the sacred. Levinas, however, thus worries about our appreciation of beauty: for if the sacred, as he argues, discloses an ostensibly unmanifestable mystical or metaphysical absolute as if it were at one with the material forces that traverse and underlie beings, then beauty’s repose ultimately represents the moral complacency of a disclosure that all is right on some “deeper level.” By contrast, the holy, which reveals itself in the relation to another and which Levinas opposes to the sacred, represents a different unmanifestability—of the other as such and of the infinite responsibility to which the other’s appeal, by decentering one absolutely, subjects one thereby—but this encounter, instead of inviting complacency, thus incessantly challenges us. In the following, I clarify Levinas’s position by explicating his account of beauty and his claim that beauty manifests an unmanifestable sacred and then discussing Levinas’s distinction between the sacred and holy and explicating his worries about the sacred. I conclude by discussing the caution he believes we should exercise in appreciating beauty, but also the latter’s exigency, a consideration that can help resolve issues in Levinas scholarship as well as current debates on the moral value of art. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition)
9 pages, 178 KB  
Article
Historicizing the Invisible: Cognition and Transformation in Thomas Kuhn
by Mark Nader Basafa
Religions 2026, 17(2), 210; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17020210 - 10 Feb 2026
Viewed by 328
Abstract
This article argues that Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions developed a historicized and developmental account of cognition in which scientific transformation depends on encounters with what is not yet discernible within existing conceptual frameworks. Drawing on Kuhn’s early writings and archival [...] Read more.
This article argues that Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions developed a historicized and developmental account of cognition in which scientific transformation depends on encounters with what is not yet discernible within existing conceptual frameworks. Drawing on Kuhn’s early writings and archival materials, the study situates his thought within a transatlantic intellectual lineage that includes William James, Susanne K. Langer, Jean Piaget, Michael Polanyi, and Ludwik Fleck, as well as anti-foundational models of inquiry associated with Otto Neurath. Kuhn’s notion of a “fringe of vague meaning” designates a cognitive condition in which non-objects exert directive force prior to conceptual articulation. Indiscernibility is not treated as subjective confusion or phenomenological experience but as a historically situated and socially mediated phase of cognitive reorganization. Scientific revolutions, like religious transformations in domains that permit conceptual reorganization, share a common cognitive structure: both depend on the capacity to dwell within indiscernibility long enough for new structures of intelligibility to form. By historicizing the invisible, Kuhn offers a post-holistic account of transformation grounded in developmental cognition, symbolic mediation, and collective inquiry rather than metaphysical unity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition)
12 pages, 244 KB  
Article
In a Flash of Lightning: Conversion and the Non-Object Through Kierkegaard and Eliot
by Jesse D. Goodman
Religions 2025, 16(11), 1345; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16111345 - 24 Oct 2025
Viewed by 831
Abstract
In both T.S Eliot’s poetry and the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, conversion serves as an escape from the noise and din of social life. Similarly, both writers implicitly respond to Hegelian Absolute Idealism’s placement of poetry and religious practice within “picture-thinking,” outside of [...] Read more.
In both T.S Eliot’s poetry and the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, conversion serves as an escape from the noise and din of social life. Similarly, both writers implicitly respond to Hegelian Absolute Idealism’s placement of poetry and religious practice within “picture-thinking,” outside of real knowledge. Conversion appears in both thinkers as a response to the pressures of social life, and as a breakdown in communication between religious adherents and their society. Kierkegaard especially articulates the impossible space of Christians within “Christendom.” This paper takes as its point of comparison Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” reading it through a lens from Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works. First, I work through the development of anxiety as a social phenomenon in both, before turning to Eliot and Kierkegaard’s depiction of the conversion event as self-obliterative. I then explore the silence after conversion, with a particular interest in the cessation of metaphysical speculation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition)
22 pages, 377 KB  
Article
The Reality of the Invisible: The Phenomenology of Invisibility in H. Conrad-Martius’s Metaphysical Realism
by Ronny Miron
Religions 2025, 16(10), 1240; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16101240 - 28 Sep 2025
Viewed by 1207
Abstract
This article aims to establish the theoretical foundations for a phenomenology of the invisible, conceived as an ontologically primary dimension of reality. It draws on the work of the realist phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888–1966) and situates the discussion within the methodological framework of [...] Read more.
This article aims to establish the theoretical foundations for a phenomenology of the invisible, conceived as an ontologically primary dimension of reality. It draws on the work of the realist phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888–1966) and situates the discussion within the methodological framework of Husserl’s phenomenology—as developed by members of the Munich–Göttingen Circle, of which Conrad-Martius was one of the leading figures, and which employed the methods of Ideation and epoché. This study elaborates three ontological structures, Nothingness, Selfness (ichhaftes Sein), and Transcendence, proposed here as anchor points for addressing the phenomenon of invisibility. Through this, it seeks to extend the phenomenological notion of givenness from what appears to that which resists appearance. Given that Conrad-Martius herself does not explicitly link these structures—as developed in her thought—to invisibility, nor does her writing offer a systematic conceptual development or detailed examination of their broader implications, the author—taking inspiration from Eugen Fink’s notion of “philosophizing-along-with” (Mit-Philosophieren) as a means to achieve a methodological and “theoretical stance”—frames a thematic exploration of invisibility in relation to these structures. The article thus proposes an ontologically grounded phenomenological framework for understanding the invisible as an integral dimension of the totality of reality: the primordial ground preceding all existence (Nothingness), the structural condition of human reality (Selfness), and that which lies beyond both human finitude and existence as such (Transcendence). In doing so, it seeks to contribute to contemporary phenomenological discourse by articulating the invisible as a fundamental mode of Being. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition)
13 pages, 274 KB  
Article
The Crush of Life’s Passion: Interiority in Michel Henry as a Possibility for the Experience of God
by Simon Cunningham
Religions 2024, 15(12), 1418; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15121418 - 22 Nov 2024
Viewed by 1654
Abstract
The question of whether God can be given in first-hand experience is debated in the secondary literature of Michel Henry. Articulating the history and structure of interiority more deeply provides a more precise conceptualization of his interiority to emerge and thus settle the [...] Read more.
The question of whether God can be given in first-hand experience is debated in the secondary literature of Michel Henry. Articulating the history and structure of interiority more deeply provides a more precise conceptualization of his interiority to emerge and thus settle the question, namely that Henry’s thought contains both a dualism and duality. Within his dualism, Henry’s interior appearing is foundational, and has no capacity to reconcile with the world’s appearing that asserts exteriority as a foundation of what is given. Yet an interior/exterior duality emerges within Henry’s foundational interiority. Experiences of things like chairs are exteriorly given in life, while experiences of affectivity like gratitude are interiorly given in life. Since interior experiences are unified with our life and are our life, they lack any phenomenological distance that reduce God to finitude. Thus interiority, when both the foundation and the experience, establishes both a possibility for a first-hand experience of God and a glimpse into God’s experience of Godself. The article closes by showing how Henry suggests a name for God when given in first-hand experience: the Holy Spirit. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition)
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-7
Back to TopTop