Abstract
Philosophy is the best cultural practice of criticism we have. It cannot construct worldviews from scratch but, especially in its pragmatist versions, it provides us with the means for internal critique and helps us to discover which varieties of pluralism with regard to religions and worldviews are rationally acceptable and which are not. But as a rational and conceptual enterprise, it always remains embedded into the practical activity of sense-making and cannot claim to be in possession of a higher or neutral point of view.
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https://americanhumanist.org/about/ (accessed 20/11/2018).
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Rather unfortunately, John Dewey, one of the most important pragmatist philosophers, was prone to confusing his own brand of non-reductive, methodological naturalism with a full-fledged naturalist worldview. For a detailed critical assessment, cf. Jung (2016).
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By emphasizing this, I do not mean to deny that within religion philosophy can be practiced in a pragmatist key nor that crossings of the border from both sides are impossible or illegitimate, as long as they are performed in a conscious manner.
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As clear as this criterion is, its practical use will certainly be hotly contested.
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For the purpose of my argumentation, the hotly debated issue whether there actually existed a hotspot in time around the middle of the first century B.C.E. for the occurrence of developments like second-order thinking, the discovery of transcendence, the rise of scientific thought etc. is not especially relevant. Even if, what has been characterized as the axial breakthrough, proves to disseminate not only into different places but also different times, the fact would remain that breakthroughs toward greater reflexivity have occurred repeatedly in the history of mankind, and that suffices for the point I wish to make here.
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Recently, Rahel Jaeggi has propounded a philosophical theory centered in the „Critique of Forms of Life” (Jaeggi 2018), which draws heavily, among others, on Dewey and shares some important aspects with the ideas developed in this chapter. A crucial difference, however, remains: Jaeggi focuses entirely on the social form and disregards the embodied, experiential aspects, which causes her to regard the limitations of philosophy as less severe than the position defended in this chapter.
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Jung, M. (2019). Worldviews and the Limits of Philosophy. In: Science, Humanism, and Religion. Studies in Humanism and Atheism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21492-0_6
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