Religious Pluralism

Abstract

Four approaches to religious pluralism are inspected, along with their presuppositions and critical problems. Given the manifest historical reality that the world's many religious traditions make numerous claims that seem, prima facie, to contradict one another, several philosophical problems arise from the fact of religious pluralism. These include adjudicating on conflicting truth claims, the epistemic warrant for such claims, whether ethical commonalities can help provide a bridge between differences and whether truth claims are incommensurable. This entry will inspect four approaches to these questions found in the literature and provide some assessment of their strengths and weaknesses.