Curb Your Enthusiasm? Philosophy and Religious Experience

Enthusiasm was described by John Locke as a form of mental assent distinct from both reason and faith, an assent fueled by nothing other than a vain and groundless conviction that one is the recipient of illumination by the Spirit of God. Locke was among the first in a long line of early modern thinkers, including John Wesley and Immanuel Kant, who warned of the epistemological, ethical, religious and socio-political dangers of countenancing enthusiasm and enthusiasts. Currently, there are calls within the philosophical community urging us to reconsider the modernist marginalization of religious experience as a warrant for belief and action. These calls span the analytic and continental divide, with some arguing that claims like ‘God spoke to me’ express properly basic beliefs for which no further evidence is available nor needed and others inviting us to practice philosophy within a discursive space
delimited by particularistic creedal confessions.