Author's Replies

The Obviousness of Epiphanies

Sophie Grace Chappell 

The Open University, UK

Chappell, Sophie Grace. 2026. “Author’s Replies: The Obviousness of Epiphanies.”

 Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 7, no. 1: 44-55. https://doi.org/10.33497/2026.winter.6.

Abstract: My book Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience proposes an approach to ethics that begins not in attempts to systematise moral philosophy, but in our own experience of life as ethical subjects, ethical agents, and ethical patients. The Journal of Philosophy of Emotion has commissioned four philosophers to write brief commentaries on Epiphanies, and me to write a brief response to their commentaries. My response follows.

Keywords: ethics, moral philosophy, epiphanies, phenomenology, experience

“Philosophy,” says Iris Murdoch, “is often a matter of finding occasions on which to state the obvious” (Sovereignty of Good 1988, 326). Or as I put it on Epiphanies (2022, 161), where I also cite Murdoch’s remark, “the whole business of the philosopher is to explain what everyone already knows.” 

For all its complexities, and for all its length, I did intend Epiphanies to be an exercise in stating the obvious in something like Murdoch’s sense. I meant it to be “a matter of assembling reminders and underliners of what, if the thesis is true at all, we already know: from our own experience” (Chappell 2022, 285; cp. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I, 127). That is perhaps particularly clear when I title Chapter 4 with the question “What is it like to be a human being?”, and spend over sixty pages providing an answer; and avowedly, not even a complete one. 

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But it is not just in Chapter 4, it is throughout the book, that the obviousness of the features and the qualities of our shared human life that I described in Epiphanies is meant to be, well, obvious to the reader. Phenomenology succeeds, I said (Chappell 2022, 171), when it “rings true with others”; not when it produces a logical demolition of “the opposition." (Why, incidentally, must there always be an opposition?) While logical incoherence is as much to be avoided in philosophy as in any other intellectual adventure, the success-conditions of phenomenology are not so much about deductive cogency, as about “sincerity, accuracy, and significance” (Chappell 2022, 116).

This emphasis on sincere and accurate delineation of the significant obvious is, I believe, a perennially necessary corrective for us philosophers, and others too. “The facts matter.” We are very good at turning our own heads with the unobvious, and not always even the significant unobvious. We philosophers are professionally trained and acculturated (by each other) to entertain, to home in on, sometimes indeed to obsess about, bizarre and unlikely scenarios; scenarios that are usually presented to us, with the characteristic sang-froid of the house-trained moral theorist, as if they were in no important way qualitatively different from more familiar and less improbable possibilities. 

For this and other reasons, philosophy—especially ethical philosophy, and especially anti-systematic ethical philosophy like mine—does need to keep a place for sheer blunt common sense, for the simple don’t-be-daft rejoinder, for observation of the obvious, just as much as it needs more formal argumentation. As I have put it elsewhere (Chappell 2024, 39), philosophy needs “Come off it” just as much as “That is logically incoherent."

My strategy of argument in Epiphanies is based precisely upon the thought that most[1] kinds of epiphany are typically obvious, and that in presenting readers with a study of epiphanies, I am bringing to their minds something that is already long-familiar to them. Broadly speaking, it is obvious that epiphanies happen in our lives, and obvious when they happen. And broadly speaking, what they tell us about our lives is obvious too. The raptures, the ecstasies, the peak-experiences, the moments of illumination and breath-take and glory, are right there in front of our noses, too plainly and clearly for even a trained philosopher to miss.

EPIPHANIES OF EXISTENCE

Hence the only general response to Epiphanies that would really have disconcerted me is, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” If readers had generally found the very idea of an epiphany incomprehensible and alien—if I were in this respect a solitary eccentric, and epiphanies were something that simply didn’t happen to almost anyone except me—then indeed I might have thought that my argument really was refuted, and that I really must have been on the wrong track all along. 

From the process of writing the book it was reasonably clear that Epiphanies would, at some times and in some places, encounter the kind of chilly silence that greets the breach of professional omertà, the offence against scientistic-naturalistic philosophical etiquette, that was involved in my talking about things that at least some of The Tough-Minded evidently still think “respectable” or “serious” philosophers are simply not supposed to have on their agenda. But the writing process also made it reasonably clear—as indeed in its own way did the occasional chilly silence—that there was no real danger of mere blank incomprehension. (Or at least not much, not often; and not sincere incomprehension, as opposed to philosophical contrariness or disputes about the 

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word “epiphany”). For a considerable portion of my writing process—a good part of why the book took me so long to write—was simply the compilation of examples of epiphanies. Indeed, given the staggering abundance of these examples, I may well have spent less time on compilation than on editing down. The difficulty was not so much to find an evidence-base of examples, as to keep it under manageable control given how much of it there was. 

At any rate, it is encouraging to see that my four commentators—to whom I am immensely grateful for their generous, painstaking, and imaginative engagement with my work—certainly know what I am talking about. 

Zanetti wants to draw my attention to a particular kind of epiphany, and suggest that it is what I am really talking about, or is one thing that I am talking about, or should be. And with that (or at least its second and third disjuncts) I am of course happy to agree, on my usual basis of “Let a hundred flowers bloom." There is indeed a sense in which every epiphany—including Murdoch’s kestrel—reveals the depth and the miracle of things’ merely being there. I think that Zanetti’s examples from Coleridge, Arendt, Hadot, and Kant—and Tikhonravov’s from Buber—illustrate this point beautifully. And I made the very same point myself, with a Chesterton quotation, in the closing words of Knowing What To Do (Chappell 2015, 323): 

I can think of plenty of people, and maybe many contemporary analytic philosophers would be among them, who might have said to Iris Murdoch, as she stared out of her window, “What? What?—It’s only a hawk." If someone did say that—what would he fail to know, what would he be missing? In one sense, nothing at all. In another, everything. Or as we might also say, the difference here is no more than the difference between saying, and not saying, “thank you” for things: 

There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude. (G.K.Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber, 1932), pp.36-7) 

REPUBLICANISM AND IMPERIALISM: 

PRACTICAL FORCE AND EPISTEMIC HUMILITY 

Yip has questions about the practical force and exigence of epiphanies; he thinks that we are likely to be constrained by the content of epiphanies themselves to move towards what he calls an empire, a realm more of imperatives than of permissions; and away from the republic of conversation that I recommend in Epiphanies Chapter 8. 

I find I want to disagree with this, for a very basic and very simple reason: call it epistemic humility. I am very far from being a fan of Oliver Cromwell, but here it is hard not to quote his famous words to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland: “I beseech you, brothers, in the bowels of Christ, consider it possible ye may be 

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mistaken” (Cromwell 1650). Nor am I much of a fan of Richard Rorty—at the deepest level I completely reject his relativism; I find it to be a kind of nihilism. Still, when we are thinking about the political and ethical force and authority of epiphanies, there is work for something like Rorty’s notion of irony. However subjectively compelling and indubitable our epiphanies may be, it is always possible and indeed necessary for us to acknowledge that we are fallible: “Sure, this is how things seem to me, but I am only me.” It is part of what epiphanies themselves teach us that a gentleness and openness to others always remains crucial, however visceral our own convictions may be. 

To play with the title of Rorty’s 1989 book, it is precisely because we are contingent that solidarity and irony are both appropriate. Nothing can justify us in making our own visions, be they ever so marvellous, a basis for imperialism against, or tyranny over, others. The thought to fall back on here is a trusting or optimistic thought, the thought that if our own visions are that cogent, then they are surely just as communicable to others as they are to us. Religious people—at least, those religious people who aren’t crazed fanatics—have long and severely salutary experience of the need to keep things republican, and of the massive dangers of epiphany-based empire-building. 

Believers of this mild and sane variety, among whom I presume to count myself, might put the trusting or optimistic thought that I have just enounced something like this: “If they need to know, then God can tell them; leave it to Him.” If God does not tell them, that is His affair; if He tells them and they refuse to know, that is their affair. If on the other hand they try to impose their vision on us—as Cromwell did to the Irish, and indeed to the Scots; not to mention the West Indies—then we are entitled to defend ourselves from their impositions; but no more than that.

So, pace Yip, I stick with the liberal, or republican, ideal that by emphasising tolerance, gets us familiarly into the paradox of tolerance. My republican principle of tolerance is, like Pettit’s republicanism, all about non-domination: it says that the only thing that justifies us in direct aggression against others is clear evidence that they seek to tyrannise others, possibly including us. And one of the worries that I have always had about moral theory, and that Yip does not talk me out of either, is that moral theory itself often seems to be imperialistic, to be intended to supply its adherents with a tool of logical coercion. Too often the theorist’s objective seems to be to build a rationally irresistible system. I think that would be a rather sinister ambition, if its track-record of abject failure were not such as to make it not so much menacing as ridiculous.

THE VISION AND THE HAMSTER-WHEEL: 

EPIPHANY AND SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

Here we do need to grasp the simple empirical point that, as a matter of fact, epiphanies have not, in history, generally pointed people in just any old direction. The truly epiphanic really does show large-scale convergence; so indeed does the anti-epiphanic. And this is true even though epiphanies—as I naturally want to say—are everywhere. 

Or at least, possibilities for epiphany are everywhere. But these possibilities often go unrealised. For also everywhere are the forces that militate against the epiphanic—distraction, inattentiveness, hurry, stress, doom-scroll and swipe-right, cynicism and greed and envy and ambition and self-absorption, megalomania and 

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epikhairekakia and pleonexia, the hamster-wheel and the strip mall and, in general, the social pathologies that T.S.Eliot so chillingly describes in “Burnt Norton”:

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker 

over the strained time-ridden faces

distracted from distraction by distraction

filled with fancies and empty of meaning 

tumid apathy with no concentration. . . .

Epiphanies are available everywhere, but there is plenty in ordinary life that is not only not epiphanic, but actively anti-epiphanic. 

And plenty in philosophy too. For example, and at the risk of sounding polemical, there is the consequentialist mindset. In the sense I mean, this is the mindset of the hamster-wheel, of the hurrying, distracted, endlessly instrumentalising and above all isolated game-player or gambler. To illustrate, here is Leif Wenar on effective altruism (EA):

The core of [EA] is a mental tool that venture capitalists use every day. The tool is “expected value” thinking . . . Expected value thinking can be applied to any choice, and it needn’t be selfish. You can aim at the most value-for-you, or the most value-for-the-universe—the method is the same… Expected value thinking can be useful in finance. But what if someone actually hacked their whole life with it? What if someone tried to calculate the expected value of every choice they made, every minute of every day? ...That’s Sam Bankman-Fried… with every choice SBF thinks in terms of maximising expected value. And his calculations are “rational” in being free from emotional connections to other people. EA encourages people to be more “rational” like this… The key to understanding SBF is that he plays people like they’re games too. With his long-suffering EA girlfriend, her expected value went up when he wanted sex and then down right afterward... This is the perfection of the EA philosophy: Maximise the value of the use of any given resource. And aren’t other people resources that can produce value? ...For SBF, good-for-me-now and good-for-everyone-always started to merge into one… When doing expected value thinking, the potential for rationalisation and self-serving bias are immense.[2]

I am of course not saying that all (nor only) consequentialists are like SBF as Wenar here describes him. (I am not, to ward off legal action, even saying that SBF is like SBF as here described.) Nor am I saying that such a mindset follows necessarily from all versions of consequentialism, or even from that particularly crass version of consequentialism that calls itself effective altruism. 

Not necessarily; yet the tendency that way is pretty natural. Almost any consequentialism tends to instrumentalise what is present for the sake of what is absent, to sacrifice the here-and-now for the sake of the (often distant) future, to turn each of us into a solitary janitor of the universal utility system,[3] to invoke what William Blake memorably calls “the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer."[4] And that makes consequentialism a clear and present danger to our capacity to sit still and clear our minds for long enough for us to be in the present, or for our minds to be open to experiencing the epiphanic. 

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Indeed crass consequentialism may well threaten even more than that. For crass consequentialism is the ideology of extractive capitalism, the ideology (as they themselves tell us) of plutocrats, oligarchs, and tyrants, the drill-baby-drill mindset of pillaging resource-capture that now dominates the world that we live in. And extractive capitalism is a threat to there being anything much that is epiphanic left for us to experience, because it is a threat to the survival of the habitable planet itself. 

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE IN EPIPHANIC EXPERIENCE

I turn to Tikhonravov’s and Gubka’s central concern, about the application to epiphanies of the active/ passive distinction. One question that I have for them is “Which active/ passive distinction?” As I said in Knowing What To Do, “what counts as my agency, and what counts as circumstance around my agency, varies depending on how good I am at imposing my agency on the world” (Chappell 2015, 26). So, therefore, does what counts as active or passive for me.

For a really strong-willed person, the scope of agency can become very wide indeed: think of Napoleon, making things happen thousands of miles away with a stroke of the pen. For a really weak-willed person, the scope of agency can dwindle right down to the vanishing-point: think of Dickens’ character Krook in Bleak House, who, until he spontaneously combusts, does almost nothing except get drunk, look over musty old letters that he can’t read, and shout impotently at his rent-dodging tenants and his impassive cat. (Chappell 2015, 26)

This has particular application to phenomena like epiphanies, because the places in our lives where epiphanies are likeliest to occur are very frequently the places where we have most succeeded in achieving a kind of stillness. And this is an achievement; but it is also stillness. Compare the way a pianist plays the rests. When with both hands she “plays nothing for a whole bar”, is that activity or passivity? (Are the spaces in between the words in this article “writing” or “not writing”?) Just sitting quiet, being still—really still—is a kind of passivity if you like; but it is also, or can be, a deliberately chosen activity. Contemplation or meditation or silence can look, from the outside, like the contemplator or meditator is “not doing much”; but in the words of Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted by Richard Foster, “Waiting upon God is not idleness, but work which beats all other work to one unskilled in it” (Foster 1980, 16). I hoped that the end of my book might be a boundary at which the silver work of words might finish, and the golden work of silence might begin. Gestures towards that point are always worth making, even if, like everything in this area, they are always easily misunderstood.

So can we work to achieve, or rather perhaps to receive, epiphanies? Certainly we can. And we do. And a large part of the work is freeing ourselves from the mindsets and the distractions that make us incapable of receiving them. In a world like ours, one very necessary task is to banish the anti-epiphanic, and to fight the forces that persistently undermine our capacity for and our openness to epiphany. It is to find and cultivate ways of being in the world that get us off the hamster-wheel. It is what in Epiphanies (Chappell 2022, 207) I called, quoting St. John of the Cross, “stilling the house”; or to quote another of Blake’s marvellous phrases, it is cleansing the doors of perception.[5] 

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Part of what is needed here, I think—and this may serve as a reminder of one thing that I have to keep saying, that epiphanies are always socially and contextually primed, and almost never merely solitary—is what MacIntyre means, in the last sentences of After Virtue, about waiting for St Benedict. In our society now, not only is distracted emptiness the norm; senseless hatred and lazy lies are also the norm. Just for that reason, we need to build new sub-societies where gratuitous love and the discipline of truth are the norm. In a world where everyone’s attention is forcibly directed towards what is worthless and empty, we need to find ways of focusing and centring our attention on better and truer realities. By all means try to change a cold bleak world; but begin by warming your own heart and hands for the task.

An autobiographical snippet is relevant here. I first became a reader, as a very small child, because there were things in the reality around me (particularly, but not exclusively, to do with my perceived gender) that I found unbearable. I needed a different way for reality to be, just in order to cope. I found it made sense then—and perhaps it makes sense now too—for us to pick our reality wisely. I don’t of course mean that we should choose delusion. But we always and inevitably filter the overwhelming torrent of reality in one way or another; so why not filter to some purpose? Without losing compassion, let us not allow ourselves to be swamped by the evil and misery “out there." To counteract that, let us create a sanctuary of truth and light “in here”, and inhabit it. Don’t let anyone else tell you what real or normal or sane is; make your own normal and sane, and make them real.

This may involve a kind of escape—not escapism—that J. R. R. Tolkien was happy to defend:[6]

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE—AND “SECULAR CALVINISM”

All of this, if you like, is negative work—it is clearing a space, maybe even making space for whatever that hopelessly compromised genius Heidegger meant by “a clearing”, which perhaps is an epiphany. This clearing a space can be an external and “objective” matter—at the limit, in this direction, it can be what Zanetti calls an “epiphany of existence”, an awareness of the simple thusness of things. In the other direction, an epiphany can also be an internal and “subjective” matter. It can, I agree with Gubka and Tikhonravov, have to do with actively seeking to make psychological or even psychoanalytical sense of ourselves. Indeed some of my own favourite examples of epiphanies are cases where someone reaches a new and transformative understanding of themselves: Ursula le Guin’s Ged, for instance (Chappell 2024, 1.44, 131).

Of course it is possible too, as Gubka argues, that we can “experience value as a creation of our own agency." What he has in mind here is the various ways in which our reflection on values that we initially experience “passively” can itself become a source of further value that we access “actively”, because this further value is created by our reflection itself: as for example when we take a second-order delight of compersion in someone else’s first-order delight. There is nothing here that I need disagree with. Gubka’s proposal about active value-experience does not eliminate the possibility of passive value-experience; indeed it presupposes it. All I 

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want to add is that I think there is one very central case of active value-reflection that I think we need to say more about: namely, the activity of the artist. I have a go of my own at saying some of this more in Epiphanies, chapter 5.

Overall, I have the same questions about this negative/ positive distinction as I had before about the active/ passive distinction: I doubt that there is a single such distinction, and I doubt that any distinction of this kind is ever exhaustive or exclusive. Alongside all that, I continue to insist that epiphanies sometimes come entirely spontaneously, entirely unbidden: at least at any conscious level, and perhaps at any level at all. (I have never liked Freud’s cruelly victim-blaming idea that nothing we come out with, nothing that ever happens to us, is ever really a slip or a mistake.) It can happen both that we make ourselves attentive and yet hear nothing, and also that we completely fail to still ourselves, and nonetheless something breaks through to us. “The wind blows where it wills”, in the words of St John’s Gospel (3.8); or as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it in The Wreck of the Deutschland, “I greet him the days that I meet him, and bless when I understand.”

So my view is not, pace Tikhonravov, “secular Calvinism." As it happens I am as personally allergic to Calvinism as anyone is ever likely to be; maybe, mirabile dictu, even more allergic than I am to consequentialism. The correct verdict on the Calvinists is Xenophanes’, avant la lettre: “everything that is a shame and reproach among humans, they have attributed to divinity” (DK 21 B11). Pure Calvinist theology, as religious belief, is an inhumane absurdity; pure Calvinist theocracy, as political system, is an inhumane atrocity. But what I have to say about the coming of epiphanies, my doctrine of grace if you will,[7] is not Calvinism unless any doctrine of grace whatever is Calvinist. There is nothing distinctively Calvinist about thinking that the coming of grace is mysterious and beyond our control: any orthodox Christian is bound to accept that, as they say in Narnia, “He’s not a tame lion.” 

By this point it may well seem that my view is not only not Calvinist, it isn’t secular either. But the whole idea was that epiphanies are available to anyone, irrespective of their religious or irreligious commitments or lack of them. The whole ambition was to give people on different sides of various sorts of confessional fence a clearer understanding of what they may in fact have in common with those on the other side, or sides. And that ambition I retain.

WESTERN PHILOSOPHERS, EASTERN PHILOSOPHERS 

On the whole, to be sure, my commentators see that what I am offering is intended—as indeed it is—not sectarianly, nor for that matter evangelistically, but ecumenically. Indeed Tikhonravov thinks that had I been what he calls an Eastern philosopher, my book would barely have needed writing at all. The reality and the importance of epiphanies is obvious, he thinks, to pretty well everyone except Western philosophers; outside our rather blinkered tradition, my book has been written already a hundred times over. 

I might quibble here with Tikhonravov’s account of Eastern philosophy, which I find suspiciously roomy one. He tells us it means “not only Indian and East Asian philosophy, but also Arab-Muslim and Eastern Christian philosophy, including Russian philosophy." Indeed it turns out that I am myself something very close to an Eastern philosopher, even if I haven’t noticed. 

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But on any definition of the tradition, I am surely very far from being even the only Western philosopher to have written about epiphanies. If Plato didn’t start it, maybe Parmenides did, with his overwhelming vision of the Goddess of Night. Or perhaps it was Heracleitus, learning to see past the idiosyncratic “private understandings” that most people comfort themselves with, to the logos which is common to all. There is Aristotle’s praise of theoria, which (despite a lot of scholarly resistance) seems as clear an exaltation of epiphany as anything could be. A matter of six centuries later, there is Augustine’s narrative of “the Vision of Ostia” in Confessions Book 10, which is as high a pitch of epiphany as Augustine—a Catholic under clear Platonist and Plotinian influence—thinks possible in this mortal life. And in that narrative, Augustine creates one of the main models for thinking about epiphany for philosophers, theologians, mystics, and spiritual advisers in the West for at least a thousand years after. It is a model that comes to dominate Western-Christian Benedictinism from its beginnings, and that is still there 800 years later in Dante’s Paradiso (consider in particular Canto 22, where St. Benedict himself appears), and 1000 years after in Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises; thanks to his Jesuit education, it is arguably there too 1100 years later, in Descartes’ own Méditations Métaphysiques. It has even, via Gregory Palamas, had some influence in Russia, despite the Orthodox dislike of Augustine’s emphases on original sin and the filioque. 

More recently, and less connected (if at all) to that Catholic framework, prominent discussions of epiphanies are there in Burke and Kant on the sublime; in Hegel himself, and in almost every one of his philosophical peers and progeny—very obviously, for example, in Novalis and Heine; in John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography and in Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s entire ways of writing; in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, passim, and in the crucial closing sections of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. When John McDowell, in a famous essay about external reasons, tentatively talks about the possibility of “conversion”, he is as plainly talking about what I call epiphanies as his inspiration Iris Murdoch. Charles Taylor talks about them too: he calls them “resources." And just in the last few years, Western philosophy has produced Laurie Paul’s Transformative Experience, Mark Wynn’s Renewing The Senses, Maria Balaska’s Anxiety and Wonder: On Being Human, Helen de Cruz’s Wonderstruck, Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism—and indeed, my own Epiphanies. There are of course, as I have already agreed, ideological currents in Western philosophy that do not run favourable to anything like the notion of epiphany. But so there are in what Tikhonravov counts as eastern philosophy—and often for the strikingly similar reason that they take epiphany to be illusion: a form of systematic doubt about epiphanies that seems as likely for an eastern Buddhist as for a western “scientific naturalist”, and which nonetheless, interestingly, none of my four commentators takes at all far. 

This mass of evidence of epiphanies, and of their convergence on a particular kind of vision of the human good, is central to my argument for thinking that—as I said at the outset—there is something deeply obvious about epiphanies. And though I do not agree with Tikhonravov that epiphanies are peculiarly missing from Western philosophy, I certainly do think that they are something that modern Western society particularly tends to occlude: “[It] might be that we [should] think of mystical yearning under capitalism as a kind of underground resistance—the glimpses that break through, despite everything, of a mysterious splendour invulnerable to economic, technological or political encroachment."[8] If epiphanies have been, and/ or are now becoming, a resistance vocation, then vive la résistance. 

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Notes

[1] As Keith Allen reminds me, epistemic epiphanies might be one large class of exceptions to this; in gaining understanding we often do see something that isn’t obvious at all. And yet even with epistemic epiphanies, one classic response is the exclamation “Of course." 

[2] Leif Wenar, “The deaths of effective altruism”, online at effective-altruism.pdf; last accessed November 26, 2024.

[3] Bernard Williams 1973, 118.

[4] William Blake 1820, fn. 55: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.”

[5] William Blake 1790, Plate 14: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” (This was the first epigraph to chapter 12 of Knowing What To Do.)

[6] I think when interviewed by the BBC, though I haven’t tracked down an exact reference.

[7] My original title for Epiphanies was Grace In The World.

[8] Rob Doyle (2024) on Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism.

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References

1. Balaska, Maria. 2024. Anxiety and Wonder: On Being Human. London: Bloomsbury.

2. Blake, William. 1820. Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion. The William Blake Archive. https://www.blakearchive.org/copy/jerusalem.mpi?descId=jerusalem.mpi.illbk.03. Accessed November 26, 2024.

3. ______. 1790. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The William Blake Archive. https://www.blakearchive.org/copy/mhh.a?descId=mhh.a.illbk.01. Accessed November 26, 2024.

4. Chappell, Sophie Grace. 2022. Epiphanies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5. ______. 2015. Knowing What To Do. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

6. ______. 2024. Trans Figured. Cambridge: Polity Press.

7. Chesterton, G. K. 1932. Chaucer. London: Faber.

8. Critchley, Simon. 2024. On Mysticism. London: Profile Books. 

9. de Cruz, Helen. 2024. Wonderstruck. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

10. Doyle, Rob. 2024. “On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy Review – In the Presence of a Higher Power,” The Guardian. Accessed November 26, 2024.

11. Cromwell, Oliver. 1650. “To the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland.” The Cromwell Association. Website. Last accessed November 26, 2024. https://www.olivercromwell.org/Letters_and_speeches/letters/Letter_129.pdf.

12. Eliot, T. S. (1936) 1969. “Burnt Norton.” Available at http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/. Accessed November 26, 2024.

13. Foster, Richard. 1980. Celebration of Discipline. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 

14. Murdoch, Iris. 1998. The Sovereignty of Good. In Existentialists and Mystics, edited by Peter Conradi, pp. 297-385. London: Allen Lane.

15. Paul, Laurie. Transformative Experience. 2014. New York: Oxford University Press.

16. Pettit, Philip. 1997. Republicanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

17. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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18. Williams, Bernard and J. J. C. Smart. 1973. Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

19. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1951. Philosophical Investigations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

20. Wynn, Mark. 2013. Renewing The Senses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sophie Grace Chappell © 2026

Author email: Sophie[dash]Grace[dot]Chappell[at]open[dot]ac[dot]uk