Religiosität als Qualität des Säkularen

In the discourse about religion's legitimate role in the democratic public sphere, it is often assumed that religious and secular forms of thought can be clearly demarcated based on their respective metaphysical presuppositions. The question to what extent a transcendent reality is presupposed is hereby often taken as an indication of the incompatibility between religious and secular thinking. The pragmatist John Dewey set out a theory of religion in the first half of the 20th century, which, in light of this tendency, desists from dichotomizing the fundamental difference between transcendence and immanence. Annette Pitschmann unfolds Dewey's theory against the background of his conception of reality and tests its plausibility in line with his philosophy of science and theory of action as well as his aesthetics.