Experience and Non-Objects: The Limits of Intuition

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

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