Editorial

Introduction to the Book Symposium on 

Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience

Evgenia Mylonaki

University of Patras, GR

Mylonaki, Evgenia. 2026. “Introduction to the Book Symposium on Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience.” 

Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 7, no. 2: i-x. https://doi.org/10.33497/2026.winter.0i. 

Abstract: This introduction situates Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience within a broader philosophical lineage that treats experience, rather than judgment or theory, as the primary site of value. Drawing on John Dewey’s and William James’s conception of experience as “double-barrelled”—encompassing both what is experienced and how it is experienced—the essay argues that Chappell develops an ethics grounded in the inclusive integrity of lived experience. Epiphanies are presented not as rare mystical events, but as moments in which revelation and what is revealed become one, disclosing value through the full integrity of experience. The introduction emphasizes Chappell’s phenomenological method, her resistance to moral theoreticism, and her account of experience as revelation. It also highlights the existential significance of her “republic of conversation,” an inclusive dialogical space in which moral understanding emerges through shared reflection on experience. The symposium contributions extend this conversation by addressing questions of agency, authority, cultivation, and pluralism in epiphanic ethics.

Keywords: Experience, epiphany, value, phenomenology, moral philosophy, Sophie Grace Chappell, John Dewey, William James 

PHILOSOPHIES OF EXPERIENCE

We are beings of life, me and you, and as such we are here briefly. But we are, also, beings of experience. This puts us in connection with a vastness undreamed of for the scale of our time on earth. —In the story told so far, you may notice an unfamiliar trope. Aren’t we supposed to be the super smart bipeds whose claim to gorgeousness owes to the intellect and its many achievements? And isn’t this intellect of ours supposed to be what sets us apart 

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from the animal of experience? Sure we experience, but isn’t the grand, the major thing about us precisely what sets us apart from this experience, for it is what allows us to step back from it and judge? There are philosophers who think this, there are thinkers, there are people who think this. Sophie Grace Chappell is not one of them. Sophie Grace Chappell thinks that the grand, the major thing about us starts where we start: in experience. She thinks, we are beings of experience. She thinks, this puts us in communion with something far greater than our lot on earth will ever come to. She thinks, our being, our being beings of experience in this sense, is what makes us worth another book, another look, another word.

When discussing experience, John Dewey famously remarks that “[I]t is not experience which is experienced, but nature—stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, temperature, electricity, and so on. Things interacting in certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced. Linked in certain other ways with another natural organism—the human organism—they are how things  are experienced as well. Experience thus reaches down into nature; it has depth. It also has breadth and to an indefinitely elastic extent. It stretches. That stretch constitutes inference” (Dewey 1929, 4a, 1).  Experience stretches, it is made of expansiveness, of reaching out to include increasingly more, indefinitely more; presumably in the way of knowledge, the way of being based on, the way of inferring. The wondrousness of this expansiveness shows up in the next paragraph as a dialectical difficulty often expressed about experience thus conceived: “It is said to be absurd that what is only a tiny part of nature should be competent to incorporate vast reaches of nature within itself.” (Ibid.) But the difficulty is turned on its head. It is precisely what seems to many so difficult to comprehend that is revealed as the gorgeousness of these bipeds: “Look at these tiny parts of nature, look at how they incorporate vast reaches within themselves!” Observe, look, pay attention, is what Sophie Grace Chappell does in her Epiphanies, and urges us to do also. “Philosophers have wanted merely to change the world; but the first thing is to observe it” (Chappell 2022, 170). Yet, where Dewey wants to say it is the vastness of nature that is held within this other natural organism—the human—, Chappell wants to say it is the vastness of value—perhaps, a trite name for what collects all that is good and beautiful and can command the deepest, the rarest, the most difficult devotion of all, thereby raising us humans to reach closer into what is divine. You may want to keep this little word, “yet”, within arm’s reach, until I come back to it. In the meantime, “Look at these tiny parts of nature, look at how they incorporate vast reaches within themselves.” It is awfully important that we keep something like the shape of this thought in mind as we read through Chappell’s unusually rich book; unusually rich, for contemporary philosophy. 

I say it is awfully important for two reasons. The first is that the thought expressed in this mark of admiration helps us appreciate the spirit in which so much of human experience—from the letters, from the arts and from the sciences—is offered for view in this learned woman’s book of Experience and Value. The second reason has to do with a thought we find, once more, in Dewey’s book of Experience and Nature. This is a thought he finds in William James’s collection of Essays in Radical Empiricism. I quote it as fully as convention will allow me: 

We begin by noting that “experience” is what James called a double-barrelled word. Like its congeners, life and history, it includes what men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine—in short, processes of experiencing. “Experience denotes the planted field, the sowed seeds, the reaped harvests, the changes of night and day, spring and autumn, wet and dry, heat and cold, that are observed, feared, longed for; it also denotes the one 

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who plants and reaps, who works and rejoices, hopes, fears, plans, invokes magic or chemistry to aid him, who is downcast or triumphant. It is “double-barrelled” in that it recognises in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalysed totality. “Thing” and “thought”, as James says in the same connection, are single-barrelled; they refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience. It is significant that “life” and “history” have the same fullness of undivided meaning. Life denotes a function, comprehensive activity, in which organism and activity are included. Only upon reflective analysis does it break up into external conditions - air breathed, food taken, ground walked upon—and internal structures—lungs respiring, stomach digesting, legs walking. The scope of “history” is notorious: it is the deeds enacted, the tragedies undergone; and it is the human comment, record, and interpretation that inevitably follow. Objectively, history takes in rivers, mountains, fields and forests, wars and institutions; subjectively it includes the purposes and plans, the desires and emotions, through which these things are administered and transformed. Now empirical method is the only method which can do justice to this inclusive integrity of “experience”. It alone takes this integrated unity as the starting point for philosophic thought. Other methods begin with results of a reflection that has already torn in two the subject-matter experienced and the operations and states of experiencing. The problem is then to get together again what has been sundered - which is as if the king’s men started with the fragments of the egg and tried to construct the whole egg out of them. For empirical method the problem is nothing so impossible of solution. Its problem is to note how and why the whole is distinguished into subject and object, nature and mental operations. Having done the, it is in a position to see to what effect the distinction is made: how the distinguished factors function in the further control and enrichment of the subject-matters of crude but total experience. (Dewey 1929, 8-9)

Wonder at these tiny parts that can incorporate so much is inseparable from this thought that James and Dewey share, that “experience” is a double-barrelled word. The two senses of the word exist side by side and when the gun of experience fires, it fires in both—if all is good and in order. The first is what is experienced and the second is how is experienced. Reaching this appreciation of the inclusive integrity of experience is, I think, inseparable from the wonder that Dewey first expresses as a dialectical difficulty with the thought that such a tiny part of nature can incorporate vast reaches of nature within itself. Others, inspired by the works of so-called German idealism, feel this wonder in the concept of self-consciousness, as the concept of this tiny part of nature as containing all of what exists in its consciousness, thereby being nature’s self-consciousness. For philosophers like Sophie Grace Chappell and John Dewey, on the other hand, when one manages to keep our size and our reach in awareness all at once, one is properly struck by the concept of experience; by the idea, that is, that it is in our being affected as we are and in our being connected with other parts of nature as we are, we acquire a reach outwardly into other parts and inwardly into our selves, so vast that “it is said to be absurd” that we can be this elastic and can stretch so far, as to reach from where we are immediately located into parts of the past and the future and of the occurrent world, such as we will never find our bodies within. No matter which way we go—toward self-consciousness or toward experience—if we are left without proper feeling, this connection (or consciousness) of ours with the vastness of what is, of nature, in other words, may prompt us to go on leaving behind the ones who are thus connected; or it may prompt us to go inwards into the connection leaving behind all that this connection allows us to stretch to. In either case, we go wrong. But in the case of experience, in particular, we are left without experience in its primal vital modes; for we neglect one barrel at the cost of the 

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other. Wonder —that a part of nature so small can incorporate reaches of nature so vast!—is precisely our awareness in the moment in which it holds both knowledges at once. And this brings me to the second reason why it is awfully important to keep this awe in mind while reading Epiphanies: it will help us appreciate Chappell’s gestures when she points from what is experienced to how it is experienced and vice versa. It will help us appreciate that the question what it is like to be human in this world is no other than the question how it is that we are linked to what is, in the light of the fact that our reach into what is is vast while our hand is small. It will help us appreciate that the question what are epiphanies the experiences of and what is the soul nourished on are questions about how far in and out we should reach in order to properly understand the origin and the spring of the vastness that we may incorporate within. How far in and how far out—notice the two barrels again. 

Chappell is quick to remind us something that Dewey does not tire of stressing: the fact that there are two barrels to experience does not mean that we are left without questions of reflection. The fact that experience in its primary and vital modes does not admit of the reflective division of its subject matter between the mental and the physical or the active and the passive or between the subject and the object, the fact that experience in its primary apprehension does not start from reflective fragments of eggs that the king’s men must compose the egg from (Dewey, 1929, p. 9)), does not mean that experience is our closure into reflective isolation and givenness. Quite the contrary: if we trust the moment of awe, we will appreciate that experience, in the reflective mode, opens into questions, which may either carry us forward into new territories of knowledge or return us back to what was already known. If we stress the unitary character of experience it is to make sure we take our philosophical flight from its primary apprehension and not from one of its reflective divisions—which is what Chappell methodically and persistently does, time and again, in this magnificent book of rare, empirical-philosophical reflection. The double-barrel of experience is, we might say continuing from Dewey’s wonderful prose, the planted field, but also the one who plants, and in the moment of reflection, both barrels fire into questions. For Dewey: what is nature and what is it like to be human in this world? For Chappell: what is value and what is it like to be human in this world? For Dewey, the question of nature is the question of experience, and for Chappell, the question of value is the question of experience; ‘experience' in the fullness of undivided meaning. It is important that we see this as clearly as possible. Experience in its primary, in its vital modes, experience in its inclusive integrity, as Dewey vividly puts it, is both thing done and acted upon and the acting and being acted upon—the questions of experience are questions for both.

To get our heads around the sort of inclusivity involved in this notion of experience it helps to consider the concept of life. Dewey says: “Life denotes a function, comprehensive activity, in which organism and activity are included. Only upon reflective analysis does it break up into external conditions - air breathed, food taken, ground walked upon—and internal structures—lungs respiring, stomach digesting, legs walking.” (Dewey, 1929, p. 9) The concepts of life are in their primary apprehension, unintelligible except as concepts of experience, except as involving that is, both concepts such as “air breathed”, “food taken”, “ground walked upon” and concepts such as “lungs respiring” and “stomach digesting”, “legs walking”.‘Air breathed’ and ‘lungs respiring’, we might say, are unintelligible except in terms of each other; it is impossible to get to a recognisable notion of ‘air’—one we may recognise as the concept we live with—from material that does not include thought of what the ‘lungs’ do; and vice versa. Let me pause here for the thought that concepts of what is there and concepts of what we do constitute different aspects of one and the same logical category of thinkables: life, history, experience. In Dewey’s thought, these aspects break away from the general category only upon reflective analysis. It is reflection which sees ground walked upon and legs walking. In experience, what reflection sees as 

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ground walked upon and legs walking is recognised as one, for it is recognised as the vital operation of walking. In experience, ground and legs, food and stomach, air and lungs are not divided from each other.  And this, not because experience is lacking in conceptual or reflective refinement. This is, rather, because experience recognises walking and eating and breathing as the life functions in their primary integrity, in their being no less than operations of life. This, in other words, is because what in reflective thinking are analysed into subjective activities and objective conditions are in experience recognised as one operation of living: walking. If we see ground and legs as experience sees them, as the living operation of walking, we will see ground—legs. Thus, it is not simply that experience is an aspectual word, containing in its notion two aspects, both the planted field and the one who plants. Nor is it simply that it is impossible to understand the one thing save in terms of the other. It is, rather, that what in reflection is analysed into the subjective and the objective is, in experience, recognised as one; in Dewey, as nature. Similarly, I think, in Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies, it is not simply that what is experienced, value, and the experiencing, epiphanies, are impossible to comprehend except in terms of each other. It is rather that what, in reflection, is analysed as the objective and the subjective is, in experience, recognised as one. 

But what is the one in Epiphanies? Of course, in a sense, it is nature or the world, if by this we mean what exists. Chappell starts the book with three epiphanies: one of a lark, the other of a kestrel and the last of a falcon. And yet the book is not about birds, Chappell tell us in a playful state of mind. Is and is not, I would say. But it surely is crucial, for us, to start with the ‘is not’: What interests Chappell in the experiences she starts the book with (Griffith’s lark, Murdoch’s kestrel, Hopkins’ falcon) is not the experience in which the sort of thing revealed to one is that there is a bird, or a kestrel, or even a kestrel hovering. What interests Chappell is the experience in which the sort of thing revealed and the revelation are one. What interests Chappell is that there is in the world such beauty and kindness and need and injustice as can arrest us, stop us in our tracks, bewilder us, catch us off guard, or slowly creep up into our souls, feed, nourish them, change us, transform us, free us or subjugate us, speak to the part of us which is made for what speaks. Let me try again: what interests Chappell in the book is that there are such things in the world as revelations and things revealed and that we can recognise either for what they are only if we start in experience, for in experience they are one. At first, it seems as if Chappell means to say in certain experiences and not others, but as the book progresses, it transpires that Chappell thinks that the two barrels, the revelation and the thing revealed, are the two barrels of human experience. What is it we thus receive in experience? The list extends indefinitely from Murdoch’s kestrel hovering to the tree of Xerxes (Chappell, 2022, p. 281-2). We might say: the moving largeness of life, the hitherto unseen and unheard vastness of the cosmos, the beauty of the morning light, the tender heart that injustice breaks, the works of art and beauty, Dante’s Beatrice—and so much more, still. About things such as these, Chappell says, “if you don’t talk about them the right way, then you don’t talk about them at all” (Ibid., p. 96); if in other words, you do not see them as revealed, or in the descriptions in which they are revealed, you do not see them at all. And this is precisely why Chappell has us read so many wonderful passages from poems, from letters, from novels, from philosophy, from religion. The beauty and the goodness of what is beautiful and good, what matters, what makes a difference, what our lives should be grabbed by, what attracts us and leads us out of our darkness and unknowingness, the quiet evening light on the sea’s rippling water, the stretch of the horizon, the unexpected bloom, the long awaited green, the giant sycamore tree that moves the wind, what stirs the soul and moves it now this way now that way, all these are not there at all except if seen in the ways in which experience sees them. Revealing and thing revealed are one in the experiences in which Chappell calls epiphanies. And reflection’s work 

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is to separate the two, as is also to ask: in virtue of what does the separation happen? And, also, what is revealed and how? In virtue of what, does the revealing happen? 

This latter question Chappell poses as a question concerning the what it’s likeness of being human in this world and she considers under the heading of what she calls aspects, modes of experience such as, place, body, and self, time, the senses, pain and pleasure, mood and emotion, humour, attention, and the continuum from wakefulness to drowsiness. But also, music and sex, desire, other people, religion, work, conscience, art. Notice the diversity, notice the richness, notice the ease of the taxonomy. This is no Kantian table of forms of the sensibility. The claim to exhaustiveness here is not systematic but phenomenological. Have I omitted an aspect of human experiencing, Chappell would respond to ‘How about’ questions, then by all means let us continue listing and explaining, she would add. What are we doing when we consider, in our professional philosophical lives, value only in the moment in which something or another is judged to be right or good? Two things: One, we are impoverishing the modes of the experiencing in which value is revealed. And, two, we are excluding from communion with what matters those who, due to the conditions of their birth or life, are not adept at judging. I mention judging, here, as what the learned, fearful man takes all men and women to be primarily doing. Kant admits in the table of what shapes experience only space and time. He would have been appalled to see music and sex on the list. But, we are such as to experience in sex and in music. And these modes, these clusters of possibility for our capacity to take in what may only be given to us in these modes—notice the deeper Kantian ring of the Deweyean/Chappellian thought I have been developing so far in this essay—these modes, I say, are not to be omitted from a serious, critical project in philosophy, if we want to really understand ourselves and the world we find and find ourselves in. 

For a long time I have thought of philosophers who think of value exclusively in terms of the object of judgment as avoiding the question of experience altogether. But I now think this is wrong. What I now think happens, instead, is that they restrict the notion of experience to the crucial, the definitive, the awe inspiring feeling of necessitation or respect, as Kant would put it; the feeling of being bound, determined in experience by something so vast that one is left feeling humbled, stricken, told. “This is right”, “That is unjust”, “What you did was bad”—judgment of this sort is nothing other than the expression, in refection, of the definitiveness, the sharpness, the boundedness, in experience, of the lawfulness, the heavy-handedness of what grabs our souls when our ego is beaten. The Kantian morality of judgment is another morality of experience—only one that leaves music and sex out. Why do I keep returning to these modes of what is in the reflective mode separated out as the experiencing? Not because of their fleshiness, for music has none; neither for their schematism for sex has none. It is rather to note that unless we start to recognise such things as music and sex as modes of experience in its vital apprehension, as modes in which thing revealed and mode of revelation are one, we will be left with a poor conception of the question that experience is, in reflection—as, indeed, we often are, in philosophy.

But philosophical work of this demanding sort is itself a reflective stretching from experience, from the primary apprehensions that music and sex and so on are. We cannot do the work of philosophical reflection, unless we ourselves start from experiences in their primary, vital modes. And: to understand such a thing as music as a mode of experience, as a mode of revelation; to inhabit our experiences reflectively—I here, come to what matters to me the most in this essay and in reading Sophie Grace Chappell—to inhabit our experience reflectively, she thinks, is to inhabit a certain space with each other: the space of conversation. “This is what matters, what matters to me, what motivates me, what gets me going, this is what cuts me off, what poisons life 

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in me, what darkens my soul, what do you think? What do you listen to? What do you believe in? Is there a kestrel hovering outside your worrisome window? Your heart in hiding, does it stir ‘for a bird—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’?” It is this space, Chappell thinks, that must be inhabited in our reflective, in our philosophical moment. 

My heart in hiding, how it stirs for a bird, for a tree, for a young face broken and oppressed by class and race and sex wars. And what, if I may, is your heart in hiding stirring for? Is it the humbling force of the must? The open field of the could? Is it other ‘persons’, other perfect reasoners such as your professional self? Or is it the man, the woman, quietly feeding old age to the birds by the window of the nursing home, loudly wondering what there is for lunch today, quietly hoping it won’t be yet another death—one’s own?—latching onto life like the lid that desperately holds on to the boiling pot, when a sudden gust of wind opens the window just enough to let itself inside, together with a stray ray of sun, gently touching the cheek, closing the eyes to the sudden burst of light, filling one to the brim with the grace of what we may know, only if we know the man, the woman, if we talk to them and ask them, or if we can imagine them, in our reflective moment, as beings for whom the beauty and the goodness that is life, that is nature, that is divine grace is revealed. What do you think? —Sophie Grace Chappell thinks, and I stand with her, that this question should not be addressed to professional philosophers alone; not to white upper class cis male men alone; not to able bodied able minded folks alone. Sophie Grace Chappell thinks that to a priori exclude anyone from the republic of conversation is to miss out on the chance to inhabit our own experience as reflectively, as fully, as critically as we could and she thinks that there’s a way to envision this republic of conversation as distinct from the republic of hate. I think that when sadness stops our heart at the sight of a withered face, a broken voice, a less than fully abled mind and body, when we contemplate all of what is or was or will be taken from us, when we feel that all seems lost for one, the sudden gust of wind may open the window, bringing the moment in which everything is transformed into experience in its primary, its vital mode, such as can stretch further than anything that the smooth face, the confident voice, the competent mind and body can ever hope to be. Where to?  Nature, Dewey will say, and if by this we mean all of what exists, Chappell will I think not quarrel with the answer. Instead, she will nod and quietly add, I think God has not forsaken us. What do you think?

PRESENTATION OF THE SYMPOSIUM

Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies: The Ethics of Experience offers a bold and poetic reorientation of moral philosophy. Rooted in lived experience, Chappell’s book advances a philosophical anthropology and a phenomenological, anti-theoretical account of ethics, in which sudden, often transformative moments of value-perception play a central role. In the spirit of dialogue that the book itself encourages, the following symposium brings together three rich and distinct responses, along with the author’s book précis and her response to the commentators.

In the first contribution, “The Phenomenology of Encounters with Value”, Stephen Gubka explores a crucial contrast to Chappell’s framing of epiphanies. While Chappell emphasizes the passivity of value-encounters—experiences that come to us unbidden, much like perceptual episodes—Gubka argues that this account is incomplete. Not all value is encountered passively; some encounters with value, he contends, are 

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experienced as the result of our own agency: we do not merely recognize value, but in certain cases, we create or constitute it through our choices, desires, or deliberative commitments. Drawing on examples from literature and moral psychology, as well as Ruth Chang’s two-stage model of decision-making, Gubka proposes an account of personal epiphanies—moments of self-discovery in which value is actively shaped rather than passively received. He proposes a broadened phenomenology and epistemology of value that accommodates both passive recognition and active constitution, suggesting that while some values may be “found,” others emerge only through what we choose to care about.

In the second contribution, “Epiphanic Empires”, Brandon Yip finds a subtle tension within Chappell’s ethical vision. On one hand, Epiphanies affirms an anti-theoretical, open-ended mode of moral reflection, grounded in what Chappell calls the "republic of conversation." On the other, it elevates epiphanies themselves as moments of normative clarity—imperious experiences that seem to dictate moral truth to us with authority. Yip argues that these imperious experiences may not only challenge moral pluralism but actively motivate theoretical structures that systematize and extend their authority. He raises three related concerns: that fidelity to epiphanic insight may generate the need for theory; that strong commitments may override dialogical norms; and that dysepiphanies—critical or disillusioning moral revelations—may lead us to pathologize those who do not share our vision. The result, he warns, is that the “republic of conversation” risks transforming into an “epiphanic empire,” where dialogue is constrained by loyalty to private revelations. Rather than rejecting Chappell’s framework, Yip presses us to reconsider whether and how deeply authoritative moral experiences can coexist with epistemic humility and democratic deliberation.

Finally, in the third contribution, “What If S.G. Chappell Were an Eastern Philosopher?”, Yuri Tikhonravov brings Chappell’s Epiphanies into dialogue with a broad spectrum of Eastern philosophical traditions—from Buddhist and Sufi mysticism to Russian religious thought. While praising Chappell for articulating a vision of moral epiphany from within the analytic tradition—rather than importing it as an alien concept—Tikhonravov contends that her account bears the mark of what he provocatively calls “secular Calvinism”: the idea that epiphanies come entirely unbidden and cannot be cultivated. By contrast, Tikhonravov suggests that Eastern traditions typically emphasize the role of spiritual labor—meditative, artistic, or ascetic—in making such experiences more frequent, vivid, and transformative. Reframing Chappell’s view through this lens, Tikhonravov envisions a more activist orientation toward value discovery, one that treats epiphanies not merely as gifts of grace but as moments that can be prepared for through disciplined deliberate practice. In doing so, he raises a provocative question: if epiphanies can reveal new final values—and if humanity today is in urgent need of such values—should we not be actively seeking them out?

Each of these responses pushes the conversation around Epiphanies into new and generative territory: from passivity to agency, from authority to dialogue, from spontaneity to spiritual cultivation. Chappell’s work has opened a philosophical space for thinking anew about the ethics of experience—and the thinkers in this symposium have stepped into that space with both critical insight and creative generosity.

In her response, Sophie Grace Chappell defends Epiphanies as a philosophical exercise in “stating the obvious,” following Iris Murdoch and Wittgenstein in presenting philosophy not as the discovery of exotic truths, but as a reminder of what experience already discloses—if only we attend. She argues that epiphanies are not rarefied or esoteric; they are familiar features of human life, and the book’s phenomenology succeeds to the extent that it “rings true.” Against critiques that her account either marginalizes human agency or risks moral 

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authoritarianism, Chappell emphasizes the paradoxical nature of epiphanic experience: it is both spontaneous and cultivated, passive and active, received and made. Stillness, she argues, is a kind of work, and receptivity a discipline—especially in a society dominated by distraction, instrumentalism, and the “hamster-wheel” of late capitalism. Responding to concerns about moral imperialism, she insists that epistemic humility must accompany even the most compelling moral insight, defending her vision of a “republic of conversation” against the threat of epiphanic dogmatism. She pushes back on charges of “secular Calvinism,” reaffirming that grace may be beyond our control but is not the monopoly of any one tradition, religious or otherwise. Finally, she rejects the claim that epiphanies are alien to Western philosophy, pointing to a long and varied lineage—from Plato and Augustine to Wittgenstein and Murdoch—that affirms the centrality of such experiences. If modernity tends to occlude the epiphanic, she argues, it is all the more urgent that we cultivate spaces—philosophical, artistic, spiritual—where attention, wonder, and transformation can still break through. Hers is a meditation on what makes human life so demanding and vulnerable, but also beautiful and worth-while that should be part of today’s much needed conversation on how to move forward in a world such as  ours.

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References

1. Dewey, John. 1929. Experience and Nature. London, UK: George Allen and Unwin.

2. Chappell, Sophie Grace. 2022. Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Evgenia Mylonaki © 2026

Author email: evg[dot]mylonaki[at]gmail[dot]com