Charlesworth on Philosophy and Religion

Max Charlesworth’s Philosophy and Religion: From Plato to Postmodernism is an erudite and scholarly work, grounded in an impressive command of the history of philosophy of religion. However, despite its many virtues, the work has some serious shortcomings, due more to what it overlooks than to what it includes. In this paper, I review Charlesworth’s taxonomy of approaches to philosophy of religion, and argue for an alternative taxonomy that does more justice to the diversity of religions and the evidence produced by social scientific studies of religion. In particular, I suggest that Charlesworth pays insufficient attention to the project of articulating, comparing and assessing competing religious and non-religious worldviews.