Reality and Mystical Experience

“Here are promising new pathways of philosophic dialogue across religious and cultural borders. Brainard has with chutzpah and creative insight invented a new terminology for comparing classical accounts of mystical experience, East and West. Close to Whitehead, and augmenting some of the efforts of Peirce, Polanyi, and Wittgenstein, he proposes a phenomenological scheme for philosophizing, once again, about the ALL, without doing violence to the plurality of particular linguistic practices in which encounters with the ALL are described. Brainard’s book is sure to awaken dormant debates on the relations among language, experience, and divinity.” —Peter Ochs, University of Virginia

“Brainard’s careful arguments help move the philosophical discussion beyond the presently dominant paradigm of contextualism. For this reason alone Brainard’s book is valuable.” —Kenneth Rose, Journal of the American Academy of Religion