Humanism as a critical, entangled, and inclusive worldview

The central question in this chapter is how to understand contemporary humanism as a worldview. Three developments in humanistic thought – towards critical, entangled, and inclusive humanism – are presented as guidelines for outlining a dynamic, contextualized, and critical view of contemporary humanism. This view critically engages with work by Dutch authors who have, over the last decades, theorized humanism as a worldview, in particular work by Jaap van Praag and Peter Derkx. Furthermore, as worldviews comprise an understanding of spirituality - an understanding of goodness that people may connect with, even in the face of severely disorienting experiences – the notion of humanist spirituality is elaborated on, on the basis of philosophical ideas by Iris Murdoch, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt.