The Varieties of Religious Experience: Centenary Essays

Another special issue of JCS devoted to reflections on William James's classic book, which everyone interested in philosophy of religion should have read. The eight contributions range over the central themes of the book, including the development of depth psychology with Eugene Taylor, the nature of ineffable experience, emotions and transformation. For me the most interesting essay is by the editor on William James and the Denial of Death. He goes through James's logic in his Ingersoll Lecture 'On Human Immortality' and asks if there is any further evidence for survival in a section entitled 'Contemporary Cognitive Science and the Afterlife'. He cites Stevenson and Sogyal Rinpoche but makes no mention at all of one hundred years of survival research or of the best books on the subject. He is right to say that we don't know for sure what follows death, but there is a great deal more to be considered. And this is the central point of James's lecture: the hypothesis that the brain produces conscious experience works well for normal science, but it seems to fall short when applied to the data of psychical research. James faced squarely up to this issue by examining the evidence (which he thought inconclusive) and his successors would do well to follow his example.