Help Stephen Law write history of Humanism
Humanist Philosophers member, Stephen Law, continues a series of posts on his blog welcoming comments and critical feedback on his upcoming book about Humanism.
The roots of modern humanism run at least as far back as the Ancient world. The kind of “big questions” humanism addresses – such as, “Does God exist?”, “What makes for a meaningful life?”, and “What makes things morally right or wrong?” – are questions humanity has been asking the world over for millennia. In many times and places, both the approach taken to answering such questions and the non-religious answers given have been similar to the approach taken and answers given by humanists today. As we are about to discover, modern humanism is able to draw on a rich and long intellectual legacy.
http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2009/12/history-of-humanism-for-comments.html
I trust that you will be giving due consideration to freethought and secularism
and particularly the work of G. J. Holyoake
This is a useful site for historical information:
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/author.html
It includes in particular
A History of the British Secular Movement
by J. E. McGee
Hi Stephen
I think it’s helpful to look at a number of movements in the 19th century which were not called Humanism but which were the precursors. These include secularism (Robert Owen, Holyoake, Bradlaugh etc), Positivism (Frederic Harrison and sympathisers such as George Eliot), the Ethical Societies (Felix Adler and his UK missionary Stanton Coit) and Rationalism (Rationalist Press Association). Unitarianism is also an important influence as it was a group of Unitarian ministers in 1920s Chicago (John Dietrich, Curtis Reese etc) who first applied the word ‘Humanism’ to what we now call Humanism. I would try to make a clear distinction between all of these movements and Renaissance Humanism, athough of course there are some commonalities.
I have an extensive bibliography on Humanism.
All the best with this
David Warden
Chair, Dorset Humanists