Plural Methods in the Study of Interreligious Relations

This essay will draw attention to a relatively new phenomenon in the study of interreligious relations, namely the extension of the concept of plurality from that of religions (“there are many religions”) and of the study of relations between religions (“there are many approaches to the study of their relations”) to the plurality of methods available to each of those approaches (“there are many philosophical methods available to the study of relations between religions”).
While it is widely acknowledged that attention to the plurality of traditions and
the relations between them is necessary for the understanding of religion in the
contemporary world, there is less attention to the complex plurality of philosophical approaches. Those who pioneered attention to religious plurality, along with the invention of “pluralism” as a guiding category for some of those pioneers, devoted little attention to matters of philosophical method, despite their focal interest in questions of truth, rival claims, multiple perspectives and matters of this kind. This is a notable lacuna which this discussion is intended to explore a little. Plurality extends not only to the phenomena to be investigated, and not only to the approaches available for those investigations, but also to the philosophical engines that power those approaches.