John Hick's Philosophical Bases of Pluralism Study and Critique

John Hick has based his Hypothesis of pluralism on three philosophical Principles, namely: Swinburne's principle of credulity, Wittgenstein's seeing-as, and Kant's Epistemology of perceptual Experience.But application of these principles on religious pluralism entails several problems as Follows: acceptance of contradictory ideas about religious experiences, which is not resolvable with referring to other experiences, intellectual arguments, and logical Possibility and the like. In the principle of credulity Hick has extended Wittgenstein’s seeing–as to the experiencing as and believes that it includes all human experiences which is formed according to individuals’ mental conceptions and religious systems.This approach leads to the improvability of the supreme Reality and denying the joint cases of religions. According to Kantian epistemology, Hick accepts that noumenal reality is ineffable and all descriptions and experiences belonging to the manifestations and phenomena. So, this idea results in polytheism or atheism. In this paper, firstly, three mentioned principles and their application in the pluralism have been explained and recited, and finally, there are some critiques which have been considered.