Introduction

This chapter focuses comparatively less on the way that philosophy itself is transformative and instead think philosophically about a variety of transformative experiences centering around the divine. This includes both the question of what the people may now call ‘religious experience’, but also the idea of the divine itself undergoing change of some kind. From the point of view of the contemporary debate about transformative experience, it is notable that in this period, as with antiquity, transformations are not everyday occurrences. Amber L. Griffioen and Kristopher G. Phillips argue in their contribution that Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy should not be read as a merely discursive treatise but rather as a broadly mystical text. Nevertheless, Klein shows how Spinoza's theory of human political change, shorn of commitment to a divine teleology, can qualify as theory of transformation in an important sense.