Abstract

When trying to understand the nature of religious experience as ‘mediated immediacy’ I am reminded of Professor J. N. Findlay's description of Hegel's thought as a kind of ‘philosophical Buchenwald’ specialising in intellectual tortures. Nevertheless, recent literature on the subject of religious experience reveals an increasing number of thinkers expressing confidence in the viability of this notion, John E. Smith of Yale being the most outstanding. This is not to say that all the thinkers categorised by ‘mediated immediacy’ have no important differences. They do. Infact, Smith might not even accept the phrase as accurately describing his position, despite the fact that J.B. Stearns applied it to his thought in a recent article