Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view, or practice that focuses on human values and concerns, attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. According to Greg M. Epstein, "Humanism today can be categorized as a movement, a philosophy of life or worldview, or ... [a] lifestance."[1] In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism.[citation needed]
Secular humanism is a secular ideology which espouses reason, ethics, and justice, whilst specifically rejecting supernatural and religious dogma as a basis of morality and decision-making. Secular humanism contrasts with religious humanism, which is an integration of humanist ethical philosophy with religious rituals and beliefs that center on human needs, interests, and abilities.[2] Renaissance humanism is a cultural movement of the Italian Renaissance based on the study of classical works.[3][4]
Religious and secular humanism arose from a trajectory extending from the deism and anti-clericalism of the Enlightenment, the various secular movements of the 19th century (such as positivism), and the overarching expansion of the scientific project.[citation needed]
The term "humanism" is ambiguous. Around 1806 Humanismus was used to describe the classical curriculum offered by German schools, and by 1836 "humanism" was lent to English in this sense. In 1856, German historian and philologist Georg Voigt used humanism to describe Renaissance humanism, the movement that flourished in the Italian Renaissance to revive classical learning, a use which won wide acceptance among historians in many nations, especially Italy.[5] This historical and literary use of the word "humanist" derives from the 15th-century Italian term umanista, meaning a teacher or scholar of Classical Greek and Latin literature and the ethical philosophy behind it.
But in the mid-18th century, a different use of the term began to emerge. In 1765, the author of an anonymous article in a French Enlightenment periodical spoke of "The general love of humanity ... a virtue hitherto quite nameless among us, and which we will venture to call ‘humanism’, for the time has come to create a word for such a beautiful and necessary thing.”[6] The latter part of the 18th and the early 19th centuries saw the creation of numerous grass-roots "philanthropic" and benevolent societies dedicated to human betterment and the spreading of knowledge (some Christian, some not). After the French Revolution, the idea that human virtue could be created by human reason alone independently from traditional religious institutions, attributed by opponents of the Revolution to Enlightenment philosophes such as Rousseau, was violently attacked by influential religious and political conservatives, such as Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, as a deification or idolatry of man.[7] Humanism began to acquire a negative sense. The Oxford English Dictionary records the use of the word "humanism" by an English clergyman in 1812 to indicate those who believe in the "mere humanity" (as opposed to the divine nature) of Christ, i.e., Unitarians and Deists.[8] In this polarized atmosphere, in which established ecclesiastical bodies tended to circle the wagons and reflexively oppose political and social reforms like extending the franchise, universal schooling, and the like, liberal reformers and radicals embraced the idea of Humanism as an alternative religion of humanity. The anarchist Proudhon (best known for declaring that "property is theft") used the word "humanism" to describe a "culte, déification de l’humanité" ("cult, deification of humanity") and Ernest Renan in L’avenir de la science: pensées de 1848 ("The Future of Knowledge: Thoughts on 1848") (1848–49), states: "It is my deep conviction that pure humanism will be the religion of the future, that is, the cult of all that pertains to man — all of life, sanctified and raised to the level of a moral value.“[9]
At about the same time, the word "humanism" as a philosophy centered around humankind (as opposed to institutionalized religion) was also being used in Germany by the so-called Left Hegelians, Arnold Ruge, and Karl Marx, who were critical of the close involvement of the church in the repressive German government. There has been a persistent confusion between the several uses of the terms:[10] philosophical humanists look to human-centered antecedents among the Greek philosophers and the great figures of Renaissance history.
6th-century BCE pre-Socratic Greek philosophers Thales of Miletus and Xenophanes of Colophon were the first to attempt to explain the world in terms of human reason rather than myth and tradition, thus can be said to be the first Greek humanists. Thales questioned the notion of anthropomorphic gods and Xenophanes refused to recognize the gods of his time and reserved the divine for the principle of unity in the universe. These Ionian Greeks were the first thinkers to assert that nature is available to be studied separately from the supernatural realm. Anaxagoras brought philosophy and the spirit of rational inquiry from Ionia to Athens. Pericles, the leader of Athens during the period of its greatest glory was an admirer of Anaxagoras. Other influential pre-Socratics or rational philosophers include Protagoras (like Anaxagoras a friend of Pericles), known for his famous dictum "man is the measure of all things" and Democritus, who proposed that matter was composed of atoms. Little of the written work of these early philosophers survives and they are known mainly from fragments and quotations in other writers, principally Plato and Aristotle. The historian Thucydides, noted for his scientific and rational approach to history, is also much admired by later humanists.[11] In the 3rd century BCE, Epicurus became known for his concise phrasing of the problem of evil, lack of belief in the afterlife, and human-centered approaches to achieving eudaimonia. He was also the first Greek philosopher to admit women to his school as a rule.
Human-centered philosophy that rejected the supernatural can be found as early as 1000 BCE in the Lokayata system of Indian philosophy. Also in the 6th-century BCE, Gautama Buddha expressed, in Pali literature, a skeptical attitude toward the supernatural:[12]
Since neither soul nor aught belonging to soul can really and truly exist, the view which holds that this I who am 'world,' who am 'soul,' shall hereafter live permanent, persisting, unchanging, yea abide eternally: is not this utterly and entirely a foolish doctrine?
In China, Huangdi is regarded as the humanistic primogenitor. Sage kings such as Yao and Shun are humanistic figures as recorded. King Wu of Zhou has the famous saying: "Human is the ling (spirit, soul, god, or leader) in the world (among all)". Among them, Duke of Zhou, respected as an initial founder of Rujia (Confucianism), is especially prominent and pioneering in humanistic thought. His words were recorded in the Book of History as follows (translated into English):
What the people desire, Heaven certainly comply.
Heaven (God) is not believable. Our Tao (doctrine) is moral (from former sage kings and to be continued forward).
In the 6th century BCE, Taoist teacher Laozi held natural humanistic philosophy. Confucius also taught secular ethics. The silver rule of Confucianism from Analects XV.24, is an example of ethical philosophy based on human values rather than the supernatural. Humanistic thought is also contained in other Confucian classics, e.g., as recorded in Zuo Zhuan, Ji Liang says: "People is the zhu (master, lord, dominance, owner or origin) of gods. So, to sage kings, people first, gods second"; Neishi Guo says: "Gods, clever, righteous and wholehearted, comply with human.
Many medieval Muslim thinkers pursued humanistic, rational and scientific discourses in their search for knowledge, meaning and values. A wide range of Islamic writings on love, poetry, history and philosophical theology show that medieval Islamic thought was open to the humanistic ideas of individualism, occasional secularism, skepticism and liberalism.[13]
According to Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, another reason the Islamic world flourished during the Middle Ages was an early emphasis on freedom of speech, as summarized by al-Hashimi (a cousin of Caliph al-Ma'mun) in the following letter to one of the religious opponents he was attempting to convert through reason:[14]
"Bring forward all the arguments you wish and say whatever you please and speak your mind freely. Now that you are safe and free to say whatever you please appoint some arbitrator who will impartially judge between us and lean only towards the truth and be free from the empery of passion, and that arbitrator shall be
Reason, whereby God makes us responsible for our own rewards and punishments. Herein I have dealt justly with you and have given you full security and am ready to accept whatever decision Reason may give for me or against me. For "There is no compulsion in religion" (
Qur'an 2:256) and I have only invited you to accept our faith willingly and of your own accord and have pointed out the hideousness of your present belief. Peace be with you and the blessings of God!"
According to George Makdisi, certain aspects of Renaissance humanism has its roots in the medieval Islamic world, including the "art of dictation, called in Latin, ars dictaminis," and "the humanist attitude toward classical language."[15]
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. The 19th-century German historian Georg Voigt (1827–91) identified Petrarch as the first Renaissance humanist. Paul Johnson agrees that Petrarch was "the first to put into words the notion that the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness.” According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors. For Petrarch and Boccaccio, the greatest master was Cicero, whose prose became the model for both learned (Latin) and vernacular (Italian) prose.
Once the language was mastered grammatically it could be used to attain the second stage, eloquence or rhetoric. This art of persuasion [Cicero had held] was not art for its own sake, but the acquisition of the capacity to persuade others – all men and women – to lead the good life. As Petrarch put it, 'it is better to will the good than to know the truth.' Rhetoric thus led to and embraced philosophy. Leonardo Bruni (c.1369–1444), the outstanding scholar of the new generation, insisted that it was Petrarch who “opened the way for us to show how to acquire learning," but it was in Bruni’s time that the word umanista first came into use, and its subjects of study were listed as five: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy, and history.”[16]
The basic training of the humanist was to speak well and write (typically, in the form of a letter). One of Petrarch’s followers, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) was made chancellor of Florence, "whose interests he defended with his literary skill. The Visconti of Milan claimed that Salutati’s pen had done more damage than 'thirty squadrons of Florentine cavalry.'”[17] Contrary to a still widely current interpretation that originated in Voigt's celebrated contemporary, Jacob Burckhardt,[18] and which was adopted wholeheartedly, especially by those moderns calling themselves "humanists",[19] most specialists now do not characterize Renaissance humanism as a philosophical movement, nor in any way as anti-Christian or even anti-clerical. A modern historian has this to say:
Humanism was not an ideological programme but a body of literary knowledge and linguistic skill based on the “revival of good letters,” which was a revival of a late-antique philology and grammar, This is how the word “humanist" was understood by contemporaries, and if scholars would agree to accept the word in this sense rather than in the sense in which it was used in the nineteenth century we might be spared a good deal of useless argument. That humanism had profound social and even political consequences of the life of Italian courts is not to be doubted. But the idea that as a movement it was in some way inimical to the Church, or to the conservative social order in general is one that has been put forward for a century and more without any substantial proof being offered.
The nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, in his classic work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, noted as a “curious fact” that some men of the new culture were “men of the strictest piety, or even ascetics.” If he had meditated more deeply on the meaning of the careers of such humanists as Abrogio Traversari (1386–1439), the General of the Camaldolese Order, perhaps he would not have gone on to describe humanism in unqualified terms as “pagan,” and thus helped precipitate a century of infertile debate about the possible existence of something called “Christian humanism” which ought to be opposed to “pagan humanism.” --Peter Partner, Renaissance Rome, Portrait of a Society 1500–1559 (University of California Press 1979) pp. 14–15.
The umanisti criticized what they considered the barbarous Latin of the universities, but the revival of the humanities largely did not conflict with the teaching of traditional university subjects, which went on as before.[20]
Nor did the humanists view themselves as in conflict with Christianity. Some, like Salutati, were the Chancellors of Italian cities, but the majority (including Petrarch) were ordained as priests, and many worked as senior officials of the Papal court. Humanist Renaissance popes Nicholas V, Pius II, Sixtus IV, and Leo X wrote books and amassed huge libraries.[21]
In the high Renaissance, in fact, there was a hope that more direct knowledge of the wisdom of antiquity, including the writings of the Church fathers, the earliest known Greek texts of the Christian Gospels, and in some cases even the Jewish Kabbalah, would initiate an harmonious new era of universal agreement.[22] With this end in view, Renaissance Church authorities afforded humanists what in retrospect appears a remarkable degree of freedom of thought.[23][24] One humanist, the Greek Orthodox Platonist Gemistus Pletho (1355–1452), based in Mystras, Greece (but in contact with humanists in Florence, Venice, and Rome) taught a Christianized version of pagan polytheism.[25]
The humanists' close study of Latin literary texts soon enabled them to discern historical differences in the writing styles of different periods. By analogy with what they saw as decline of Latin, they applied the principle of ad fontes, or back to the sources, across broad areas of learning, seeking out manuscripts of Patristic literature as well as pagan authors. In 1439, while employed in Naples at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon (at the time engaged in a dispute with the Papal States) the humanist Lorenzo Valla used stylistic textual analysis, now called philology, to prove that the Donation of Constantine, which purported to confer temporal powers on the Pope of Rome, was an 8th-century forgery.[26] For the next 70 years, however, neither Valla nor any of his contemporaries thought to apply the techniques of philology to other controversial manuscripts in this way. Instead, after the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks in 1453, which brought a flood of Greek Orthodox refugees to Italy, humanist scholars increasingly turned to the study of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, hoping to bridge the differences between the Greek and Roman Churches, and even between Christianity itself and the non-Christian world.[27] The refugees brought with them Greek manuscripts, not only of Plato and Aristotle, but also of the Christian Gospels, previously unavailable in the Latin West.
After 1517, when the new invention of printing made these texts widely available, the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who had studied Greek at the Venetian printing house of Aldus Manutius, began a philological analysis of the Gospels in the spirit of Valla, comparing the Greek originals with their Latin translations with a view to correcting errors and discrepancies in the latter. Erasmus, along with the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, began issuing new translations, laying the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. Henceforth Renaissance humanism, particularly in the German North, became concerned with religion, while Italian and French humanism concentrated increasingly on scholarship and philology addressed to a narrow audience of specialists, studiously avoiding topics that might offend despotic rulers or which might be seen as corrosive of faith. After the Reformation, critical examination of the Bible did not resume until the advent of the so-called Higher criticism of the 19th-century German Tübingen school.
The ad fontes principle also had many applications. The re-discovery of ancient manuscripts brought a more profound and accurate knowledge of ancient philosophical schools such as Epicureanism, and Neoplatonism, whose Pagan wisdom the humanists, like the Church fathers of old, tended, at least initially, to consider as deriving from divine revelation and thus adaptable to a life of Christian virtue.[28] The line from a drama of Terence, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (or with nil for nihil), meaning "I am a man, I think nothing human alien to me", known since antiquity through the endorsement of Saint Augustine, gained renewed currency as epitomizing the humanist attitude.[29]
Better acquaintance with Greek and Roman technical writings also influenced the development of European science (see the history of science in the Renaissance). This was despite what A. C. Crombie (viewing the Renaissance in the 19th-century manner as a chapter in the heroic March of Progress) calls "a backwards-looking admiration for antiquity," in which Platonism stood in opposition to the Aristotelian concentration on the observable properties of the physical world.[30] But Renaissance humanists, who considered themselves as restoring the glory and nobility of antiquity, had no interest in scientific innovation. However, by the mid-to-late 16th century, even the universities, though still dominated by Scholasticism, began to demand that Aristotle be read in accurate texts edited according to the principles of Renaissance philology, thus setting the stage for Galileo's quarrels with the outmoded habits of Scholasticism.
Just as artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci — partaking of the zeitgeist though not himself a humanist – advocated study of human anatomy, nature, and weather to enrich Renaissance works of art, so Spanish-born humanist Juan Luis Vives (c. 1493–1540) advocated observation, craft, and practical techniques to improve the formal teaching of Aristotelian philosophy at the universities, helping to free them from the grip of Medieval Scholasticism.[31] Thus, the stage was set for the adoption of an approach to natural philosophy, based on empirical observations and experimentation of the physical universe, making possible the advent of the age of scientific inquiry that followed the Renaissance.[32]
It was in education that the humanists' program had the most lasting results, their curriculum and methods:
were followed everywhere, serving as models for the Protestant Reformers as well as the Jesuits. The humanistic school, animated by the idea that the study of classical languages and literature provided valuable information and intellectual discipline as well as moral standards and a civilized taste for future rulers, leaders, and professionals of its society, flourished without interruption, through many significant changes, until our own century, surviving many religious, political and social revolutions. It has but recently been replaced, though not yet completely, by other more practical and less demanding forms of education.[33]
The progression from the humanism of the renaissance to that of the 19th and 20th centuries came about through two key figures: Galileo and Erasmus. Cultural critic, Os Guinness explains that the word humanist during the renaissance initially only defined a concern for humanity, and many early humanists saw no dichotomy between this and their Christian faith. See Christian Humanism
"Yet it was from the Renaissance that modern Secular Humanism grew, with the development of an important split between reason and religion. This occurred as the church's complacent authority was exposed in two vital areas. In science, Galileo's support of the Copernican revolution upset the church's adherence to the theories of Aristotle, exposing them as false. In theology, the Dutch scholar Erasmus with his new Greek text showed that the Roman Catholic adherence to Jerome's Vulgate was frequently in error. A tiny wedge was thus forced between reason and authority, as both of them were then understood."[34]
The phrase the "religion of humanity" is sometimes attributed to American Founding Father Thomas Paine, though as yet unattested in his surviving writings. According to Tony Davies:
Paine called himself a theophilanthropist, a word combining the Greek for "God", "love," and "man", and indicating that while he believed in the existence of a creating intelligence in the universe, he entirely rejected the claims made by and for all existing religious doctrines, especially their miraculous, transcendental and salvationist pretensions. The Parisian "Society of Theophilanthropy" which he sponsored, is described by his biographer as "a forerunner of the ethical and humanist societies that proliferated later" ... [Paine's book] the trenchantly witty Age of Reason (1793) ... pours scorn on the supernatural pretensions of scripture, combining Voltairean mockery with Paine's own style of taproom ridicule to expose the absurdity of a theology built on a collection of incoherent Levantine folktales.[35]
Davies identifies Paine's The Age of Reason as "the link between the two major narratives of what Jean-François Lyotard[36] calls the narrative of legitimation": the rationalism of the 18th-century Philosophes and the radical, historically based German 19th-century Biblical criticism of the Hegelians David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach. "The first is political, largely French in inspiration, and projects 'humanity as the hero of liberty'. The second is philosophical, German, seeks the totality and autonomy of knowledge, and stresses understanding rather than freedom as the key to human fulfillment and emancipation. The two themes converged and competed in complex ways in the 19th century and beyond, and between them set the boundaries of its various humanisms.[37] Homo homini deus est ("Man is a god to man" or "god is nothing [other than] man to himself"), Feuerbach had written.[38]
Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans, known to the world as George Eliot, translated Strauss's Das Leben Jesu ("The Life of Jesus", 1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach's Das Wesen Christianismus ("The Essence of Christianity"). She wrote to a friend:
the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man ... the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of goodness entirely human (i.e., an exaltation of the human).[39]
Eliot and her circle, who included her companion George Henry Lewes (the biographer of Goethe) and the abolitionist and social theorist Harriet Martineau, were much influenced by the positivism of Auguste Comte, whom Martineau had translated. Comte had proposed an atheistic culte founded on human principles—a secular Religion of Humanity (which worshiped the dead, since most humans who have ever lived are dead), complete with holidays and liturgy, modeled on the rituals of a what was seen as a discredited and dilapidated Catholicism.[40] Although Comte's English followers, like Eliot and Martineau, for the most part rejected the full gloomy panoply of his system, they liked the idea of a religion of humanity. Comte's austere vision of the universe, his injunction to "vivre pour altrui" ("live for others", from which comes the word "altruism"),[41] and his idealization of women inform the works of Victorian novelists and poets from George Eliot and Matthew Arnold to Thomas Hardy.
The British Humanistic Religious Association was formed as one of the earliest forerunners of contemporary chartered Humanist organizations in 1853 in London. This early group was democratically organized, with male and female members participating in the election of the leadership, and promoted knowledge of the sciences, philosophy, and the arts.[42]
In February 1877, the word was used pejoratively, apparently for the first time in America, to describe Felix Adler. Adler, however, did not embrace the term, and instead coined the name "Ethical Culture" for his new movement – a movement which still exists in the now Humanist-affiliated New York Society for Ethical Culture.[43] In 2008, Ethical Culture Leaders wrote: "Today, the historic identification, Ethical Culture, and the modern description, Ethical Humanism, are used interchangeably."[44]
Active in the early 1920s, F.C.S. Schiller labeled his work "humanism" but for Schiller the term referred to the pragmatist philosophy he shared with William James. In 1929, Charles Francis Potter founded the First Humanist Society of New York whose advisory board included Julian Huxley, John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. Potter was a minister from the Unitarian tradition and in 1930 he and his wife, Clara Cook Potter, published Humanism: A New Religion. Throughout the 1930s, Potter was an advocate of such liberal causes as, women’s rights, access to birth control, "civil divorce laws", and an end to capital punishment.[45]
Raymond B. Bragg, the associate editor of The New Humanist, sought to consolidate the input of Leon Milton Birkhead, Charles Francis Potter, and several members of the Western Unitarian Conference. Bragg asked Roy Wood Sellars to draft a document based on this information which resulted in the publication of the Humanist Manifesto in 1933. Potter's book and the Manifesto became the cornerstones of modern humanism, the latter declaring a new religion by saying, "any religion that can hope to be a synthesizing and dynamic force for today must be shaped for the needs of this age. To establish such a religion is a major necessity of the present." It then presented 15 theses of humanism as foundational principles for this new religion.
In 1941, the American Humanist Association was organized. Noted members of The AHA included Isaac Asimov, who was the president from 1985 until his death in 1992, and writer Kurt Vonnegut, who followed as honorary president until his death in 2007. Gore Vidal became honorary president in 2009. Robert Buckman was the head of the association in Canada, and is now an honorary president.[citation needed]
After World War II, three prominent Humanists became the first directors of major divisions of the United Nations: Julian Huxley of UNESCO, Brock Chisholm of the World Health Organization, and John Boyd-Orr of the Food and Agricultural Organization.[46]
In 2004, American Humanist Association, along with other groups representing agnostics, atheists, and other freethinkers, joined to create the Secular Coalition for America which advocates in Washington, D.C. for separation of church and state and nationally for the greater acceptance of nontheistic Americans. The Executive Director of Secular Coalition for America is Sean Faircloth, a long-time state legislator from Maine.
The original signers of the first Humanist Manifesto of 1933, declared themselves to be religious humanists. Because, in their view, traditional religions were failing to meet the needs of their day, the signers of 1933 declared it a necessity to establish a religion that was a dynamic force to meet the needs of the day. However, this "religion" did not profess a belief in any god. Since then two additional Manifestos were written to replace the first.[citation needed]
In the Preface of Humanist Manifesto II, the authors Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson (1973) assert that faith and knowledge are required for a hopeful vision for the future. Manifesto II references a section on Religion and states traditional religion renders a disservice to humanity. Manifesto II recognizes the following groups to be part of their naturalistic philosophy: “scientific,” “ethical,” “democratic,” “religious,” and “Marxist” humanism.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, members of Humanist organizations have disagreed as to whether Humanism is a religion. They categorize themselves in one of three ways. Religious Humanism, in the tradition of the earliest Humanist organizations in the UK and US, attempts to fulfill the traditional social role of religion.[47] Secular Humanism considers all forms of religion, including religious Humanism, to be superseded.[48] In order to sidestep disagreements between these two factions, recent Humanist proclamations define Humanism as a life stance; proponents of this view making up the third faction. Regardless of implementation, the philosophy of all three groups rejects deference to supernatural beliefs and addresses ethics without reference to them, attesting that ethics is a human enterprise. It is generally compatible with atheism[49] and agnosticism,[50] but being atheist or agnostic does not, itself, make one a Humanist. Nevertheless, humanism is diametrically opposed to state atheism.[51][52] According to Paul Kurtz, considered by some to be the founder of the American secular humanist movement,[53] one of the differences between Marxist-Leninist atheists and humanists is the latter's commitment to "human freedom and democracy" while stating that the militant atheism of the Soviet Union consistently violated basic human rights.[54] Kurtz also stated that the "defense of religious liberty is as precious to the humanist as are the rights of the believers."[54] Greg M. Epstein states that, "modern, organized Humanism began, in the minds of its founders, as nothing more nor less than a religion without a God."[55]
Modern Humanists, such as Corliss Lamont or Carl Sagan, hold that humanity must seek for truth through reason and the best observable evidence and endorse scientific skepticism and the scientific method. However, they stipulate that decisions about right and wrong must be based on the individual and common good. As an ethical process, Humanism does not consider metaphysical issues such as the existence or nonexistence of supernatural beings. Humanism is engaged with what is human.[56]
Contemporary Humanism entails a qualified optimism about the capacity of people, but it does not involve believing that human nature is purely good or that all people can live up to the Humanist ideals without help. If anything, there is recognition that living up to one's potential is hard work and requires the help of others. The ultimate goal is human flourishing; making life better for all humans, and as the most conscious species, also promoting concern for the welfare of other sentient beings and the planet as a whole.[citation needed] The focus is on doing good and living well in the here and now, and leaving the world a better place for those who come after. In 1925, the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead cautioned: "The prophecy of Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man, who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the servant and the minister of nature. It still remains to be seen whether the same actor can play both parts."[57]
Humanism (when without "secular" as a qualifying adjective, written with a capital 'H')[58] is a comprehensive life stance or world view which embraces human reason, metaphysical naturalism, altruistic morality and distributive justice, and consciously rejects supernatural claims, theistic faith and religiosity, pseudoscience, and perceived superstition.[59][60][61] Many Humanists derive their moral codes from a philosophy of utilitarianism, ethical naturalism or evolutionary ethics, and some advocate a science of morality.[62]
The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) is the world union of more than 100 Humanist, rationalist, irreligious, atheistic, Bright, secular, Ethical Culture, and freethought organizations in more than 40 countries. The "Happy Human" is the official symbol of the IHEU as well as being regarded as a universally recognised symbol for those who call themselves Humanists (as opposed to "humanists"). In 2002, the IHEU General Assembly unanimously adopted the Amsterdam Declaration 2002 which represents the official defining statement of World Humanism.[63]
All member organisations of the IHEU are required by IHEU bylaw 5.1[64] to accept the IHEU Minimum Statement on Humanism:
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
Polemics about humanism have sometimes assumed paradoxical twists and turns. Early 20th century critics such as Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, and T.S. Eliot considered humanism to be sentimental "slop" (Hulme) or overly feminine (Pound)[65] and wanted to go back to a more manly, authoritarian society such as (they believed) existed in the Middle Ages. Postmodern critics who are self-described anti-humanists, such as Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, have asserted that humanism posits an overarching and excessively abstract notion of humanity or universal human nature, which can then be used as a pretext for imperialism and domination of those deemed somehow less than human. Philosopher Kate Soper[66] notes that by faulting humanism for falling short of its own benevolent ideals, anti-humanism thus frequently “secretes a humanist rhetoric”.[67] In his book, Humanism (1997), Tony Davies calls these critics "humanist anti-humanists". Critics of antihumanism, most notably Jürgen Habermas, counter that while antihumanists may highlight humanism's failure to fulfill its emancipatory ideal, they do not offer an alternative emancipatory project of their own.[68] Others, like the German philosopher Heidegger considered themselves humanists on the model of the ancient Greeks, but thought humanism applied only to the German "race" and specifically to the Nazis and thus, in Davies' words, were anti-humanist humanists.[69] Such a reading of Heidegger's thought is itself deeply controversial, Heidegger includes his own views and critique of Humanism in Letter On Humanism. Davies acknowledges that after the horrific experiences of the wars of the 20th century "it should no longer be possible to formulate phrases like 'the destiny of man' or the 'triumph of human reason' without an instant consciousness of the folly and brutality they drag behind them." For "it is almost impossible to think of a crime that has not been committed in the name of human reason." Yet, he continues, "it would be unwise to simply abandon the ground occupied by the historical humanisms. For one thing humanism remains on many occasions the only available alternative to bigotry and persecution. The freedom to speak and write, to organize and campaign in defense of individual or collective interests, to protest and disobey: all these can only be articulated in humanist terms."[70]
Humanism increasingly designates an inclusive sensibility for our species, planet and lives. While retaining the definition of the IHEU with regard to the life stance of the individual, inclusive Humanism enlarges its constituency within homo sapiens to consider humans' broadening powers and obligations.
This accepting viewpoint recalls Renaissance Humanism in that it presumes an advocacy role for Humanists towards species governance, and this proactive stance is charged with a commensurate responsibility surpassing that of individual Humanism. It identifies pollution, militarism, nationalism, sexism, poverty and corruption as being persistent and addressable human character issues incompatible with the interests of our species. It asserts that human governance must be unified and is inclusionary in that it does not exclude any person by reason of their collateral beliefs or personal religion alone. As such it can be said to be a container for undeclared Humanism, instilling a species credo to complement the personal tenets of individuals.
Dwight Gilbert Jones writes that Humanism may be the only philosophy likely to be adopted by our species as a whole – it is thus incumbent on inclusive Humanists to not place unwarranted or self-interested conditions on its prospective adherents, nor associate it with religious acrimony.[71]
- ^ Esptein, Greg M. (2010). Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. New York: HarperCollins. p. 169. ISBN 978-0-06-167011-4.
- ^ "Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto". http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/edwin_wilson/manifesto/ch2.html. Retrieved 14 May 2006.
- ^ Compact Oxford English dictionary. Oxford University Press. 2007. "humanism n. 2 a Renaissance cultural movement that turned away from medieval scholasticism and revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman thought."
- ^ Nicholas Mann (1996). The Origins of Humanism. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–2. "The term umanista was used, in fifteenth century Italian academic jargon to describe a teacher or student of classical literature and the arts associated with it, including that of rhetoric. The English equivalent 'humanist' makes its appearance in the late sixteenth century with a similar meaning. Only in the nineteenth century, however, and probably for the first time in Germany in 1809, is the attribute transformed into a substantive: humanism, standing for devotion to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and the humane values that may be derived from them."
- ^ As J. A. Symonds remarked, “the word humanism has a German sound and is in fact modern” (See The Renaissance in Italy Vol. 2:71n, 1877). Vito Giustiniani writes that in the German-speaking world “Humanist” while keeping its specific meaning (as scholar of Classical literature) “gave birth to further derivatives, such as humanistisch for those schools which later were to be called humanistische Gymnasien, with Latin and Greek as the main subjects of teaching (1784). Finally, Humanismus was introduced to denote ‘classical education in general' (1808) and still later for the epoch and the achievements of the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century (1841). This is to say that ‘humanism’ for ‘classical learning‘ appeared first in Germany, where it was once and for all sanctioned in this meaning by Georg Voigt (1859)", Vito Giustiniani, "Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of Humanism", Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (vol. 2, April–June, 1985): 172.
- ^ “L’amour général de l’humanité ... vertu qui n’a point de nom parmi nous et que nous oserions appeler ‘humanisme’, puisqu’enfin il est temps de créer un mot pour une chose si belle et nécessaire"; from the review Ephémérides du citoyen ou Bibliothèque raisonée des sciences morales et politiques, (chapter 16, Dec, 17, 1765): p.247, quoted in V. Giustiniani, op. cit., p. 175n.
- ^ Although Rousseau himself devoutly believed in a personal God, his book, Emile: or, On Education, does attempt to demonstrate that atheists can be virtuous. It was publicly burned. During the Revolution, Jacobins instituted a cult of the Supreme Being along lines suggested by Rousseau. In the 19th-century French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) founded a "religion of humanity", whose calendar and catechism echoed the former Revolutionary cult. See Comtism
- ^ The Oxford English Dictionary. VII (2nd ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989. pp. 474–475.
- ^ "Ma conviction intime est que la religion de l’avenir sera le pur humanisme, c’est-à-dire le culte de tout ce qui est de l’homme, la vie entière santifiée et éléve a une valeur moral.”, quoted in Giustiniani, op. cit.
- ^ An account of the evolution of the meaning of the word humanism from the point of view of a modern secular humanist can be found in Nicolas Walter's Humanism – What's in the Word (London: Rationalist Press Association, 1997 ISBN 0-301-97001-7). From the same perspective, but somewhat less polemical, can be found in Richard Norman's On Humanism (Thinking in Action) (London: Routledge: 2004). For a historical and philologically oriented view see Vito Giustiniani, "Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of Humanism" (1985), cited above.
- ^ Potter, Charles (1930). Humanism A new Religion. Simon and Schuster. pp. 64–69.
- ^ "Lesson 1: A brief history of humanist thought". Introduction to Humanism: A Primer on the History, Philosophy, and Goals of Humanism. The Continuum of Humanist Education. http://humanisteducation.com/class.html?module_id=1&page=1. Retrieved 21 August 2009.
- ^ Lenn Evan Goodman (2003), Islamic Humanism, p. 155, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-513580-6.
- ^ Ahmad, I. A. (3 June 2002). "The Rise and Fall of Islamic Science: The Calendar as a Case Study" (PDF). Faith and Reason: Convergence and Complementarity. Al-Akhawayn University. http://images.agustianwar.multiply.com/attachment/0/RxbYbQoKCr4AAD@kzFY1/IslamicCalendar-A-Case-Study.pdf. Retrieved 31 January 2008
- ^ Makdisi, George (April–June 1989). "Scholasticism and Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West". Journal of the American Oriental Society (Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 109, No. 2) 109 (2): 175–182. DOI:10.2307/604423. JSTOR 604423
- ^ Johnson, Paul (2000). The Renaissance. New York: The Modern Library. pp. 32–34 and 37. ISBN 0-679-64086-X.
- ^ Johnson, Paul (2000). The Renaissance. New York: The Modern Library. p. 37.
- ^ The influence of Jacob Burckhardt's classic masterpiece of cultural history, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) on subsequent Renaissance historiography is traced in Wallace K. Ferguson's The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Historical Interpretation (1948).
- ^ For example the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, adhering to the tenacious 19th-century narrative (or myth) of the Renaissance as a complete break with the past established in 1860 by Jacob Burckhardt, describes the liberating effects of the re-discovery of classical writings this way:
Here, one felt no weight of the supernatural pressing on the human mind, demanding homage and allegiance. Humanity—with all its distinct capabilities, talents, worries, problems, possibilities—was the center of interest. It has been said that medieval thinkers philosophized on their knees, but, bolstered by the new studies, they dared to stand up and to rise to full stature."Humanism". "The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition. Cambridge University Press. 1999.
- ^ "The term umanista was associated with the revival of the studia humanitatis "which included grammatica, rhetorica, poetics, historia, and philosophia moralis, as these terms were understood. Unlike the liberal arts of the eighteenth century, they did not include the visual arts, music, dancing or gardening. The humanities also failed to include the disciplines that were the chief subjects of instruction at the universities during the Later Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance, such as theology, jurisprudence, and medicine, and the philosophical disciplines other than ethics, such as logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics. In other words, humanism does not represent, as often believed, the sum total of Renaissance thought and learning, but only a well-defined sector of it. Humanism has its proper domain or home territory in the humanities, whereas all other areas of learning, including philosophy (apart from ethics), followed their own course, largely determined by their medieval tradition and by their steady transformation through new observations, problems, or theories. These disciplines were affected by humanism mainly from the outside and in an indirect way, though often quite strongly."Paul Oskar Kristeller, Humanism, pp. 113–114, in Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner (editors), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1990).
- ^ See their respective entries in Sir John Hale's Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1981).
- ^ To later generations, the Dutch humanist, Desiderius Erasmus, epitomized this reconciling tendency). According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Enlightenment thinkers remembered Erasmus (not quite accurately) as a precursor of modern intellectual freedom and a foe of both Protestant and Catholic dogmatism." Erasmus himself was not much interested in the Kabbalah, but several other humanists were, notably Pico della Mirandola. See Christian Kabbalah.)
- ^ Bergin, Thomas; Speake, Jennifer (1987). The Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. Oxford: Facts On File Publications. pp. 216–217.
- ^ "Only thirteen of Pico della Mirandola's nine hundred theses were thought theologically objectionable by the papal commission that examined them.... [This] suggests that, in spite of his publicly expressed contempt in his Apologia for their intellectual inadequacies, the Curial authorities hardly saw these theses as the work of a dangerous theological modernist like Luther or Calvin. Unorthodox though they were, most of the issues raised in them had been the subject of theological dispute for centuries and the commission ... condemned him not for innovations but for 'reviving several of the errors of gentile philosophers which are already disproved and obsolete.'” Davies (1997), p 103.
- ^ Richard H. Popkin (editor), The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (1998), p. 293 and p. 301.
- ^ More than 100 years earlier, Dante in the Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321) had pinpointed the Donation of Constantine (which he accepted as genuine) as a great mistake and the cause of all the political and religious problems of Italy, including the corruption of the Church. Although Dante had thunderously attacked the idea that the Church could have temporal as well as spiritual powers, it remained to Valla to conclusively prove that the legal justification for such powers was spurious.
- ^ Ironically, it was a humanist scholar, Isaac Casaubon, in the 17th century, who would use philology to show that the Corpus Hermeticum was not of great antiquity, as had been asserted in the 4th century by Saint Augustine and Lactantius, but dated from the Christian era. See Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Harvard University Press, 1991).
- ^ "Humanism". Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion. F-N. Corpus Publications. 1979. pp. 1733. ISBN 0-9602572-1-7. "Renaissance humanists rejoiced in the mutual compatibility of much ancient philosophy and Christian truths", M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (1997), p. 13.
- ^ The statement, in a play modeled or borrowed from a (now lost) Greek comedy by Menander, may have originated in a lighthearted vein – as a comic rationale for an old man's meddling – but it quickly became a proverb and throughout the ages was quoted with a deeper meaning, by Cicero and Saint Augustine, to name a few, and most notably by Seneca. Richard Bauman writes: "Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto., I am a man: and I deem nothing pertaining to man is foreign to me.' The words of the comic playwright P. Terentius Afer reverberated across the Roman world of the mid-2nd century BC and beyond. Terence, an African and a former slave, was well placed to preach the message of universalism, of the essential unity of the human race, that had come down in philosophical form from the Greeks, but needed the pragmatic muscles of Rome in order to become a practical reality. The influence of Terence’s felicitous phrase on Roman thinking about human rights can hardly be overestimated. Two hundred years later Seneca ended his seminal exposition of the unity of mankind with a clarion-call:
There is one short rule that should regulate human relationships. All that you see, both divine and human, is one. We are parts of the same great body. Nature created us from the same source and to the same end. She imbued us with mutual affection and sociability, she taught us to be fair and just, to suffer injury rather than to inflict it. She bid us extend or hands to all in need of help. Let that well-known line be in our heart and on our lips: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto." --Bauman, Human Rights in Ancient Rome, Routledge Classical Monographs, 1999, page 1).
- ^ A. C. Crombie, Historians and the Scientific Revolution, p. 456 in Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought (1996).
- ^ Gottlieb, Anthony (2000). The Dream of Reason: a history of western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 410–411.
- ^ Alleby, Brad (2003). "Humanism". Encyclopedia of Science & Religion. 1 (2nd ed.). Macmillan Reference USA. pp. 426–428. ISBN 0-02-865705-5.
- ^ P.O. Kristeller (op cit.), p. 114.
- ^ Os Guinness – The Dust of Death (Intervarsity Press 1973) p. 5
- ^ Tony Davies, Humanism (Routledge, 1997) p. 26-27.
- ^ In La Condition postmoderne
- ^ Davies (1997), p. 27.
- ^ ibid, p 28
- ^ quoted in Davies (1997), p. 27.
- ^ "Comte's secular religion is no vague effusion of humanistic piety, but a complete system of belief and ritual, with liturgy and sacraments, priesthood and pontiff, all organized around the public veneration of Humanity, the Nouveau Grand-Être Suprême (New Supreme Great Being), later to be supplemented in a positivist trinity by the Grand Fétish (the Earth) and the Grand Milieu (Destiny)" According to Davies (p. 28-29), Comte's austere and "slightly dispiriting" philosophy of humanity viewed as alone in an indifferent universe (which can only be explained by "positive" science) and with nowhere to turn but to each other, was even more influential in Victorian England than the theories of Charles Darwin or Karl Marx.
- ^ ibid p. 29
- ^ Morain, Lloyd and Mary (2007). Humanism as the Next Step. Washington, D.C.: Humanist Press. p. 109. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-931779-16-2|978-0-931779-16-2]]. http://www.americanhumanist.org/publications/Hum_as_the_Next_Step.pdf.
- ^ "History: New York Society for Ethical Culture". New York Society for Ethical Culture. 2008. http://www.nysec.org/sitemap/about-ethical-culture/history/. Retrieved 6 March 2009.
- ^ "Ethical Culture". American Ethical Union. http://aeu.org/library/articles/Ethical_Culture.pdf. Retrieved 23 February 2009.
- ^ Stringer-Hye, Richard. "Charles Francis Potter". Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography. Unitarian Universalist Historical Society. http://wWorldWarII5.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/charlesfrancispotter.html. Retrieved 1 May 2008.
- ^ American Humanist Association
- ^ Wilson, Edwin H. (1995). The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto. Amherst, NY: Humanist Press. This book quotes the constitution of the Humanistic Religious Association of London, founded in 1853, as saying, "In forming ourselves into a progressive religious body, we have adopted the name 'Humanistic Religious Association' to convey the idea that Religion is a principle inherent in man and is a means of developing his being towards greater perfection. We have emancipated ourselves from the ancient compulsory dogmas, myths and ceremonies borrowed of old from Asia and still pervading the ruling churches of our age."
- ^ Kurtz, Paul (1995). Living Without Religion: Eupraxophy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. p. 8.
- ^ Baggini, Julian (2003). Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN 0-19-280424-3. "The atheist's rejection of belief in God is usually accompanied by a broader rejection of any supernatural or transcendental reality. For example, an atheist does not usually believe in the existence of immortal souls, life after death, ghosts, or supernatural powers. Although strictly speaking an atheist could believe in any of these things and still remain an atheist... the arguments and ideas that sustain atheism tend naturally to rule out other beliefs in the supernatural or transcendental."
- ^ Winston, Robert (Ed.) (2004). Human. New York: DK Publishing, Inc. p. 299. ISBN 0-7566-1901-7. "Neither atheism nor agnosticism is a full belief system, because they have no fundamental philosophy or lifestyle requirements. These forms of thought are simply the absence of belief in, or denial of, the existence of deities."
- ^ Paul Kurtz, Vern L. Bullough, Tim Madigan (19 October 2009). Toward a New Enlightenment: the Philosophy of Paul Kurtz. Transaction Books. ISBN 978-1-56000-118-8. http://books.google.com/?id=e9OJSW5dkM8C&pg=PA250&dq=militant+atheist+deaths#v=onepage&q&f=false. "In the past, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union waged unremitting warfare against religion. It persecuted religious believers, confiscated church properties, executed or exiled tens of thousands of clerics, and prohibited believers to engage in religious instruction or publish religious materials. It has also carried on militant pro-atheist propaganda campaigns as part of the official ideology of the state, in an effort to establish a "new Soviet man" committed to the ideals of Communist society. Mikhail Gorbachev is dismantling such policies by permitting greater freedom of religious conscience. If his reforms proceed unabated, they could have dramatic implications for the entire Communist world, for the Russians may be moving from militant atheism to tolerant humanism."
- ^ Paul Kurtz, Vern L. Bullough, Tim Madigan (19 October 2009). Toward a New Enlightenment: the Philosophy of Paul Kurtz. Transaction Books. ISBN 978-1-56000-118-8. http://books.google.com/?id=e9OJSW5dkM8C&pg=PA250&dq=militant+atheist+deaths#v=onepage&q&f=false. "Ranged against the true believer are the militant atheists, who adamantly reject the faith as false stupid, and reactionary. They consider all religious believers to be gullible fools and claim that they are given to accepting gross exaggerations and untenable premises. Historic religious claims, they think, are totally implausible, unbelievable, disreputable, and controvertible, for they go beyond the bounds of reason. Militant atheists can find no value at all to any religious beliefs or institutions. They resist any effort to engage in inquiry or debate. Madalyn Murray O'Hair is as arrogant in her rejection of religion as is the true believer in his or her profession of faith. This form of atheism thus becomes mere dogma."
- ^ The New Atheism and Secular Humanism. Center for Inquiry. 19 October 2009. http://www.pointofinquiry.org/paul_kurtz_the_new_atheism_and_secular_humanism/. "Paul Kurtz, considered by many the father of the secular humanist movement, is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo."
- ^ a b Paul Kurtz, Vern L. Bullough, Tim Madigan (19 October 2009). Toward a New Enlightenment: the Philosophy of Paul Kurtz. Transaction Books. ISBN 978-1-56000-118-8. http://books.google.com/?id=e9OJSW5dkM8C&pg=PA250&dq=militant+atheist+deaths#v=onepage&q&f=false. "There have been fundamental and irreconcilable differences between humanists and atheists, particularly Marxist-Leninists. The defining characteristic of humanism is its commitment to human freedom and democracy; the kind of atheism practiced in the Soviet Union has consistently violated basic human rights. Humanists believe first and foremost in the freedom of conscience, the free mind, and the right of dissent. The defense of religious liberty is as precious to the humanist as are the rights of the believers."
- ^ Esptein, Greg M. (2010). Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-167011-4.
- ^ Lamont, Corliss (1997). The Philosophy of Humanism, Eighth Edition. Humanist Press: Amherst, New York. pp. 252–253. ISBN 0-931779-07-3. "Conscience, the sense of right and wrong and the insistent call of one's better, more idealistic, more social-minded self, is a social product. Feelings of right and wrong that at first have their locus within the family gradually develop into a pattern for the tribe or city, then spread to the larger unit of the nation, and finally from the nation to humanity as a whole. Humanism sees no need for resorting to supernatural explanations, or sanctions at any point in the ethical process."
- ^ Science and the Modern World (New York: Simon and Schuster, [1925] 1997) p. 96.
- ^ Doerr, Edd (November/December 2002). "Humanism Unmodified". The Humanist. http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/DoerrND02.htm. Retrieved 5 July 2008.
- ^ Edwords, Fred (1989). "What Is Humanism?". American Humanist Association. http://www.americanhumanist.org/who_we_are/about_humanism/What_is_Humanism. Retrieved 19 August 2009. "Secular Humanism is an outgrowth of eighteenth century enlightenment rationalism and nineteenth century freethought... Secular and Religious Humanists both share the same worldview and the same basic principles... From the standpoint of philosophy alone, there is no difference between the two. It is only in the definition of religion and in the practice of the philosophy that Religious and Secular Humanists effectively disagree."
- ^ Compact Oxford English dictionary. Oxford University Press. 2007. "humanism n. 1 a rationalistic system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters."
- ^ "Definitions of humanism (subsection)". Institute for Humanist Studies. http://humaniststudies.org/humphil.html. Retrieved 16 January 2007.
- ^ Secular humanists John Shook and Sam Harris advocate, for example
- ^ "Amsterdam Declaration 2002". International Humanist and Ethical Union. http://www.iheu.org/amsterdamdeclaration. Retrieved 5 July 2008.
- ^ "IHEU's Bylaws". International Humanist and Ethical Union. http://www.iheu.org/bylaws. Retrieved 5 July 2008.
- ^ Fascist apologist Ezra Pound called sentimental humanism “an old bitch gone in the teeth". See Tony Davies, Humanism (Routledge, 1997) p. 48.
- ^ in Humanism and Anti-humanism (Problems of Modern European Thought) (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Press, 1986, p. 128.
- ^ quoted in Davies (1997) p. 49.
- ^ Habermas accepts some criticisms leveled at traditional humanism but believes that humanism must be rethought and revised rather than simply abandoned.
- ^ "The antihhumanist Humanism of Heidegger and the humanist antihumanism of Foucault and Althusser" (Davies [1997]), p. 131.
- ^ Davies (1997), pp. 131–32
- ^ Jones, Dwight (2009). Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism. 17 (1). http://www.essaysinhumanism.org.
- Bauman, Richard. Human Rights in Ancient Rome. Routledge Classical Monographs, 1999 ISBN 0-415-17320-5
- Berry, Philippa and Andrew Wernick. The Shadow of Spirit: Post-Modernism and Religion. Routledge, (1992) 2006. ISBN 0-415-06638-7
- Burckhardt, Jacob, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy' 1860.
- Davies, Tony. Humanism The New Critical Idiom. Drakakis, John, series editor. University of Stirling, UK. Routledge, 1997 ISBN 0-415-11052-1
- Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Five Centuries of Interpretation. New York: Nachdruck: AMS, 1981 (Boston: Mifflin, 1948)
- Gay, Peter. The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French enlightenment. New York: W. W. Norton (1971). OCLC 11672592
- Gay, Peter. Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1996 ISBN 0-393-31366-2
- Giustiniani,Vito. "Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of Humanism", Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (vol. 2, April – June, 1985): 167 – 95. [1] [2]
- Grafton, Anthony. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800. Harvard University Press, 1991
- Grafton, Anthony. Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004 ISBN 978-0-674-00468-9
- Grendler, Paul F. '"Georg Voigt: Historian of Humanism", in: Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt.
- Christopher S. Celenza und Kenneth Gouvens, Editors. Leiden 2006, pp. 295–326 ISBN 90-04-14907-4
- Guinness, Os. The Dust of Death Intervarsity Press 1973 ISBN 0-87784-911-0
- Hale, John. A Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 1981 ISBN 0-500-23333-0.
- Johnson, Paul. The Renaissance. Modern Library Chronicles. New York: Modern Library, 2002 ISBN 0-8129-6619-0
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. The University of Chicago Press, 1950.
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought and its Sources. Columbia University Press, 1979 ISBN 0-231-04513-1
- Partner, Peter. Renaissance Rome, Portrait of a Society 1500–1559 University of California Press, 1979
- Proctor, Robert. Defining the Humanities. Indiana University Press, 1998 ISBN 0-253-21219-7
- Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Origins of Greek Thought. Cornell University Press, (1962) 1984 ISBN 0-8014-9293-9
- Schmitt, Charles B. and Quentin Skinner, Editors. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy. Cambridge, 1990.
- Wernick, Andrew. Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: The Post-theistic Program of French Social Theory. Cambridge University Press, 2001 ISBN 0-521-66272-9
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