Plurality and relativity: Whitehead, Jainism, and the reconstruction of religious pluralism (Alfred North Whitehead)

This dissertation is an attempt to construct a pluralistic approach to religion in the tradition of such theologians and philosophers of religion as Raimon Panikkar and John Hick, but with a significant difference. Unlike the pluralistic theories of these scholars, my approach is based on a synthesis of Alfred North Whitehead's process metaphysics and the Jain ‘philosophy of relativity.’; The point of this project is to address the many valid logical objections which have been raised against pluralistic interpretations of religion while preserving the basic insight underlying these interpretations: that the claim that many religions are expressive of salvific truth can be given a logically valid philosophical justification. Such interpretations, at least as they are currently formulated, typically degenerate under analysis into self-refuting relativisms. My claim, however, is that a form of religious pluralism can be developed on the basis of a synthesis of Jain and process metaphysics which expresses the understanding of the relativity of truth which lies at the heart of current versions of this position, but which does not reject altogether the notion of an absolute truth as the logical foundation for the relativity of religious claims.; The relativity of truth in terms of some absolute conception of reality, the mutual implication of the relative and the absolute, I claim, is an insight shared by both Jain and process metaphysics. These two philosophies of relativity, I claim to demonstrate, are logically compatible, despite their many interesting differences, and can together form components of a single, internally coherent philosophical approach to religion (and to conceptual plurality in general) which avoids the problems that plague more conventional pluralisms.; The traditional Jain approach to religious and philosophical plurality is the model I use for developing a pluralistic system for the interpretation and evaluation of particular religious claims as relatively true, but I do so on basis of Whitehead's metaphysical theism. I claim that this approach improves upon previous pluralistic theories of religion while yet advancing the same basic position that many religions can be conceived as ‘true.’...