Religious Experience

This Element looks at religious experience and the role it has played in philosophy of religion. It critically explores the history of the intertwined discourses on mysticism and religious experience, before turning to a few specific discussions within contemporary philosophy of religion. One debate concerns the question of perennialism vs. constructivism and whether there is a 'common core' to all religious or mystical experience independent of interpretation or socio-historical background. Another central discussion concerns the epistemology of purportedly theophanic experience and whether a perceptual model of religious experience can provide evidence or justification for theistic belief. The Element concludes with a discussion of how philosophy of religion can productively widen its treatment of religious experience in the service of creating a more inclusive and welcoming discipline.

Musical Mix Clarity Prediction Using Decomposition and Perceptual Masking Thresholds

Objective measurement of perceptually motivated music attributes has application in both target-driven mixing and mastering methodologies and music information retrieval. This work proposes a perceptual model of mix clarity which decomposes a mixed input signal into transient, steady-state, and residual components. Masking thresholds are calculated for each component and their relative relationship is used to determine an overall masking score as the model’s output. Three variants of the model were tested against subjective mix clarity scores gathered from a controlled listening test. The best performing variant achieved a Spearman’s rank correlation of rho = 0.8382 (p < 0.01). Furthermore, the model output was analysed using an independent dataset generated by progressively applying degradation effects to the test stimuli. Analysis of the model suggested a close relationship between the proposed model and the subjective mix clarity scores particularly when masking was measured using linearly spaced analysis bands. Moreover, the presence of noise-like residual signals was shown to have a negative effect on the perceived mix clarity.

Religious Advertising as an Evolutionary Form of Canonical Text Retelling

Religious advertising is a new phenomenon within the Ukrainian media sphere. It is successfully developing within the framework of modern media technologies. The expansion of the semantic field of religious concepts, the citation of sacred texts, the synchronization of the visual-figurative series, the synchronization of the substitute characteristics of God were revealed in Ukrainian religious advertising. In traditional approaches, the substitutional function is realized mainly by anthropic visualizations and appeal to the Sacred text. Another substitutional type can be observed when the emphasis is on the verbalized story, rather than on the visual component. Characteristics of God's linguistic personality, behavioural models of God, status-role structure of interaction with God are modern substitutes of God. As a rule, the substitution is represented as a complex of the sensor experience verbalizators of the concept ‘OWN’. This type of substitution causes the comfortable feelings of high selfesteem, relaxation, security, care, associated with God as the subjective source of these states. As a result, a renewal of the subjective perceptual model of communication with God is achieved. The social perception of God, through the objectification of His virtual presence in informal interpersonal interaction, including sexual, domestic, cognitive, etc., is also enriched. On account of this, the level of tolerance in society to various manifestations of deviations from traditional normative ideas (religious, ethnocultural, gender, etc.) is growing.

Replies to Ben-Ze’ev, Starkey, Reyes Càrdenas, Bloomfield, LaGuardia-LoBianco, and Mendonça

In this section, I respond to all six of my commentators. I acknowledge a number of areas where the book could be improved—not least in terms of the categorisation of theories of emotion; the emphasis on the positive value of emotion as opposed to emotion’s negative aspects; and the need to consider how emotions function in a broader range of circumstances. Alongside this, I welcome the defences of the perceptual model and new perspectives on the relations between emotion and virtue that a number of commentators present.

An architecture of imagery

The development of ocularcentric culture can be traced through the modes and history of representation. The omnipotence of form and a visual aesthetic within contemporary architecture parallels this notion of visual primacy. The role of imagery within contemporary design practice is twofold: it is both a tool for investigating spatial realities and the product of a systematic design process. Emotive spaces are created when perceptual phenomena are in the vanguard rather than the aftermath of constructed objects. Through the reconsideration of image, as a multi-dimensional design tool, the spatial realities of the built context are investigated. Within film and contemporary media, architectural imagery combines with the temporal realm to enrich user perceptions of the built environment. The restoration of architecture as a communicative medium is facilitated by restructuring its current model from a formal object generated by a system of abstract geometries into a perceptual model.