Introduce yourself to the men and women who have resisted religious dogma and fixed ideologies to carve out a way of thinking in which individuals occupy center stage. Humanists are freethinkers, following no predetermined path. They are committed to inquiry and formal education and believe that “the meaning of our lives is to be found in our connections and bonds with others.”
In the 14th century, Petrarch and Boccaccio strove to cultivate “the joy in writing” and worked to enlarge and salvage the “wrecked or sunken knowledge” embodied in classical manuscripts. They were followed by the northern humanists as Erasmus and Montaigne, whose famous essays embraced “both [the] philosophical and personal,” along with the Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume, “the most intellectually merciless thinker of his time.” During the 16th century, humanists became “less naively adoring of the past, and ever more interested” in human complexity, fallibility, and uncertainty. Anti-humanism has its day as well—fascists in Italy, blasphemy laws, the contemporary zealots of artificial intelligence—all reflect on the challenges that a turbulent 20th century posed to overcoming injustice through independent thought, moral inquiry, and mutual respect. Humanism is always a “work in progress.” and “history and the human world are neither stable and good on the one hand, nor hopelessly tragic on the other, according to the author.
If the human world is our own work, and if we want it to proceed well, how do we exert ourselves to make it happen? If this question interests, this SDG will fill your soul.
