Religious Experience and Desire

What is it about?

I seek to move beyond the paradigms which have been at work in analytic philosophy of religion in accounts of religious experience. The emphasis has tended to be upon the function of such experience in providing information about God, and less has been said about its religious value (and the implications for relating to God at a personal level). I seek to redress this balance - hence the focus upon desire - and I argue that religious experience can be treated as a species of desire. I take inspiration from the conceptions of desire articulated by Levinas and Heidegger. Desire thus understood has an irreducibly cognitive dimension, and there is a Platonist and Neo-Platonist influence at work in the relevant position. I make some connections with the work of John McDowell, and argue for a disjunctivist response to scepticism about religious experience (so conceived).

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Why is it important?

Many philosophers of religion have moved beyond an overly narrow conception of the discipline to incorporate religious studies and continental philosophy. My paper is a contribution to this more expansive conception of philosophy of religion, and it trades also upon some important insights in the work of John McDowell (and more generally, those anti-scientistic philosophers who have sought to transcend a narrow naturalistic paradigm). The account of desire I offer here would be acceptable to McDowell (and Wiggins), although they would challenge its religious significance. Some relevant themes are discussed in further detail in my monograph God, Value, and Nature (OUP 2014).

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