Davide Andrea Zappulli (龍晟雨)

Religion is arguably a human universal. Any human culture or society that we know of possesses some form or another of religion. Accordingly, it is reasonable to suppose that religion and religious thinking stem from certain universal features of human nature. Yet, this assumption clashes with another fact: the seeming utter diversity of religious beliefs and practices across time and history. If religion is a human universal, then shouldn’t we expect different religions to possess the same features? I think the answer to this question is “yes.” In my research, I use analytic philosophical tools to discover, analyze, and model deep similarities across superficially different religions by inquiring into their beliefs, doctrines, and practices.

For a long time, academic philosophy has been relying to an overwhelming extent on the Western philosophical tradition. As a result, most contemporary philosophical debates have been shaped by the claims, arguments, and conceptual resources that had been put forward in such tradition. Arguably, this creates a blind spot in our theorizing. Philosophical traditions other than the Western one developed different theories and arguments which, at least in some cases, will likely provide better tools to deal with a given philosophical problem. In my work, I focus particularly on Chinese and Japanese philosophy with the aim of bringing theories and ideas from these traditions to bear on contemporary debates in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and aesthetics.

I am also interest in a variety of topics that pertain to the philosophy of mind, and particularly those that overlap with issues in the study of religion. These topics include: creativity, imagination, dreaming, psychedelic states, flow states, and the nature of consciousness. Besides finding each of these phenomena intrinsically fascinating, I am interested in untangling their connections with religious experience, mystical states, and religious cognition. Among the above-mentioned phenomena, the one I have been working on the most recently is creativity. In particular, I have been doing research on how conceptual resources from early Daoism could foster our theorizing on creativity, as well as on the very role that creative experience plays in Daoist doctrines.