Science, Humanism, and Religion: The Quest for Orientation

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?

-          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

-          Philosophy as internal criticism

-          The limits of philosophy

7.      Coda: Blocked roads and genuine options

-          Beyond scientism and religious fundamentalism

-          The secular state, worldview pluralism, and the problem of shared values

-          The optional character of worldviews: genuine options