Science, Humanism, and Religion

In the human quest for orientation vis-à-vis personal life and comprehensive reality the worldviews of religionists and humanists offer different answers, and science also plays a crucial role. Yet it is the ordinary, embodied experience of meaningful engagement with reality in which all these cultural activities are rooted.

Human beings have to relate themselves to the entirety of their lives to achieve orientation. This relation involves a non-methodical, meaningful experience that exhibits the crucial features for understanding worldviews: it comprises cognition, volition, and emotion, is embodied, action-oriented, and expressive. From this starting-point, religious and secular worldviews articulate what is experienced as ultimately meaningful. Yet the plurality and one-sidedness of these life stances necessitates critical engagement for which philosophy provides indispensable means. In the end, some worldviews can be ruled out, but we are still left with a plurality of genuine options for orientation.

Auteur
Matthias Jung is full professor of philosophy at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

Contenu

1. Introduction: Orientation as a life-function

- Science and religion a new perspective

- Humans and other organisms: From the environment to the world

- Do we need an articulated relation to comprehensive reality? - Immanuel Kant and the idea of orientation

- The incompleteness of objective reality and the primacy of meaning

- Linguistic animals: shared consciousness and the articulation of felt meaning

- The conceptual context: naturalism and humanism

2. Science vs. scientism: Is there such a thing as the scientific worldview?

- Science as a life-function

- The relative autonomy of science

- Unity and pluralism: the cognitive scope of science

- Science as a religion: what is bad about scientism

3. Varieties of naturalism and humanism

- Human values and naturalism

- The hidden agenda of modernity: Stephen Toulmin

- Middle-ground humanism

4. Rediscovering the importance of ordinary experience

- Holism

- Qualitative character

- Embodiment and transcendence

- Action-orientation

- Articulation and meaning

5. The unavoidability of worldviews

- Meaning in life and the emergence of worldviews

- Language is not (only) a tool: symbolic capacities as constitutive for worldviews

- The quest for sacredness

- Pluralism and contingency

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6. Worldviews and the limits of philosophy

- Reconsidering the role of philosophy

- Doing philosophy pragmatically - &am...