| Since first beginning to write about mysticism in the late 1970's, the philosopher Steven T. Katz has been received as a skeptic who explains away mystical experiences by reducing them to epiphenomena of mystics' cultural conditioning. Through research into the complete body of his writings both inside and outside the study of mysticism, this view is shown to be false. Katz is actually an inclusively-minded religious thinker who defends, as far as he is able, the possibility that any individual claim of mystical experience may be true, and the mystics' knowing therein fully objective in character.; The dissertation substantiates this interpretation by breaking with the common assessment of Katz's work in three fundamental respects. First, it points to methodology---not epistemology---as the source of his claim that mystical experiences differ from context to context. Second, it clarifies the nature of the object of mystical experience in his account as a potentially true interpretation of data on transcendence whose degree of truth cannot be determined. Third, it demonstrates his epistemological claim regarding the mediating influence of mind on experience to cohere fully with the possibility of objective knowing.; This re-interpretation introduces fresh perspectives into the philosophy of mysticism. It shows the disagreement between Katz and his foremost critic, Robert K. C. Forman, over the issue of pure consciousness events to be in part resolvable. It reveals Katz to be vulnerable to criticism in the area of methodology. And it shows his epistemology to lay a positive foundation for a philosophy of the kataphatic. |
