Dr. Michael Sudduth (M.Phil., D.Phil., University of Oxford) is a theistic philosopher who has extensive academic training and teaching experience in the philosophy of religion, a specialization that Sudduth has supplemented and refined during the past 25 years with work in the history of philosophy, comparative religion, theory of knowledge, metaphysics, logic, and the history of Christian thought.
Sudduth’s educational background and interests in the philosophy of religion include eastern and western concepts of God, the tradition of natural theology (i.e., proofs for God’s existence), the nature of religious experience, the relationship between religion and science, religious diversity, the history of Christian thought, Vaishnavism and Vedanta philosophy (especially Gaudiya Vedanta), and the epistemology and psychology of religious belief and practice.
Since 2006 Sudduth has expanded his specialization to the area of postmortem survival (the survival of the self or consciousness beyond physical death) as an area of inquiry in the interface between philosophy, religion, and parapsychology. Sudduth explores questions concerning religious and non-religious concepts of survival, the nature of consciousness and its relationship to brain functioning, and alleged evidences for survival drawn from data collected in the field of parapsychology, especially mediumistic phenomena and cases suggestive of reincarnation.
Sudduth’s specializations in the philosophy of religion and postmortem survival each converge on his third core interest: philosophical psychology. While interested in the general intersection between psychology, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Sudduth has a particular interest in depth psychology, specifically the analytical psychology of Carl Jung. This interest emerged from Sudduth’s regular teaching of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the first texts in the psychology of religion to acknowledge and develop the role of unconscious factors in religious conversion. Sudduth’s interest in Jungian psychology includes the relationship between personality types and how God is experienced, and the implications of Jungian archetypes and complexes for understanding both the psychodynamics of religious experience and the phenomenology of mediumship, near-death experiences, and ostensible past life memories.
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