I attempt to analyze, reconstruct, and otherwise defend William Alston's vindication of the cognitive status of mystical experience. I begin by reconstructing Alston's doxastic practice approach to epistemology, which provides him with general criteria by which to determine whether or not mystical experience contributes to the justification of an agent's mystical beliefs. I then present Alston's case for the claim that, according to his general epistemic position, there is a way of forming beliefs about God on the basis of the perception of God which we have adequate epistemic reason to believe is reliable. At the heart of Alston's case are the claims that a way of forming beliefs should be regarded as presumptively reliable so long as it is socially established and that the beliefs generated by autonomous ways of forming beliefs are not necessarily subject to epistemic norms de jure for other practices. I attempt to discredit Alston's appeal to social establishment as grounds for imputing presumptive epistemic innocence and I attempt to provide a rationale for Alston's claim that mystical beliefs should not be subject to the same epistemic norms to which we subject sense-perceptual beliefs.

A puzzle about some of the basic commitments of Leibniz's metaphysics is that they fail to come anywhere near approaching the self-evidence one should expect of metaphysical principles. Notwithstanding that Leibniz's adherence to Christian theology has not generally been granted as having had a decisive impact on his metaphysics, the latter, in fact, was largely the result of a life-long project to give a comprehensive rational defense of Christianity. In particular, a close study of four theological commitments and six metaphysical commitments in the context of Leibniz's thought reveals that the former are in a sense more basic than, are motivationally prior to, the latter. Namely: that God the perfect being exists, that Real Presence is true, that the Lutheran, Catholic, and perhaps even Calvinist accounts of the Eucharist are compatible, and that Original Sin is true. Each had a resolute impact on the formation of Leibniz's metaphysical commitments: that the actual world is the best possible world, that teleological explanation is indispensible for scientific understanding, that the substance of body is not its extension but its active principle, that natures are complete concepts, that there are no material atoms, and that actual substances were created all at once. It is not surprising that Leibniz's best-possible-world theory and his commitment to the universal applicability of teleology have their roots in his commitment to the existence of God the perfect being. But it is also the case that his anti-materialist stance on substances was formed in defense of Real Presence and in response to a reconciliatory envisionment of the Eucharist that could resolve denominational disputes; that his commitment to natures as complete concepts and his anti-atomism derive largely from a commitment to God's omniscience; and that his commitment to the all-at-once creation of substances stems from his attempts to understand Original Sin. In short, Leibniz's metaphysics is Revelation-inspired. Yet although there are some good reasons in favor of calling it a "Christian metaphysics", as he had hoped, there are some serious drawbacks to its being considered such.

Taking as a guiding thread the idea of absence or emptiness as a constitutive trait of all images, this dissertation reviews how this idea has been defended or ignored throughout diverse iconoclast moments in Western Christian civilization, focusing on the possible consequences that the basculating movement of acceptance-rejection of the image's emptiness might have for contemporary approaches to the image. The iconoclast debate from the eighth century, and the works of Freud and Lacan will be used as paradigmatic moments to penetrate into the difficult relationship man has had with images and the imaginary throughout an extended period of Western Christian history.