Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding
Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling

Wynn tackles established topics in philosophical theology in the light of new perspectives on emotions.

Mark Wynn (Author)

9780521549899, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 May 2005

216 pages
22.7 x 15.1 x 1.5 cm, 0.347 kg

'This is a brave, interesting and thought-provoking book which shows Mark Wynn's authorial voice to be possessed of a sensitive moral sensibility. … I read the book with much gratitude for its having been written, and I am sure that many others will do so too. … can be recommended to all who are concerned with the epistemology of the religious life, as well as to those who sense a lack in much contemporary philosophy of religion of a properly human sense of why religion might matter in the first place.' Religious Studies

In this book Mark Wynn argues that the landscape of philosophical theology looks rather different from the perspective of a re-conceived theory of emotion. In matters of religion, we do not need to opt for objective content over emotional form or vice versa. On the contrary, these strategies are mistaken at root, since form and content are not properly separable here - because 'inwardness' may contribute to 'thought-content', or because (to use the vocabulary of the book) emotional feelings can themselves constitute thoughts; or because, to put the point a further way, in religious contexts, perception and conception are often infused by feeling. Wynn uses this perspective to forge a distinctive approach to a range of established topics in philosophy of religion, notably: religious experience; the problem of evil; the relationship of religion and ethics, and religion and art; and in general, the connection of 'feeling' to doctrine and tradition.

Preface
1. Religious experience and the perception of value
2. Love, repentance and the moral life
3. Finding and making value in the world
4. Emotional feeling: philosophical, psychological and neurological perspectives
5. Emotional feeling and religious understanding
6. Representation in art and religion
7. The religious critique of feeling.

Subject Areas: Psychology [JM], Philosophy of religion [HRAB], Religion: general [HRA], Philosophy [HP]