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Definition: humanism from Philip's Encyclopedia

Philosophy based on a belief in the supreme importance of human beings and human values. The greatest flowering of humanism came during the Renaissance, spreading from Italy to other parts of Europe. Early adherents included Petrarch and Erasmus. Modern humanism developed as an alternative to traditional Christian beliefs. This movement, associated with social reform, was championed by Bertrand Russell. See also atheism; existentialism

Humanism

From Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Humanism is an ideology that developed in Europe at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. The ideology, which embraced humankind as a global community, went along with new ideas about human life, with a special emphasis on higher education. To humanists, understanding and interpreting the human world had acquired a new meaning: The terms held a fundamental dynamism and a new reflectedness, according to Reinhart Koselleck. This change reflected the general anthropologic worldview and self-understanding typical of early modern cultural and intellectual life in Europe. But at the same time, the meaning of humankind and humanity gained a wider scope and denser empirical horizon, as well as an intensified normative quality. Empirically, humanism addressed the growing knowledge about human culture globally and emphasized the variety and multifariousness of human cultural forms in space and time and in their historical changeability. The growing number of travelers and…
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Full text Article humanism

From Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought
1 . The outlook, prevalent particularly in Renaissance Europe, and often summed up in the ancient apophthegm ‘man is the measure of all things’, which emphasizes the human, as opposed to or at least in addition to the divine, as a centre of significance, a repository of virtue, a source of strength, …
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Full text Article Humanism

From The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies
A general term for the philosophical view that places unified human beings at the centre of any understanding of the universe. More specifically, humanism posits the existence of an ‘inner core’ as the source of meaning and action as theorized by Descartes in his famous phrase ‘I think therefore I…
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Full text Article Humanism

From The Social Science Jargon-Buster
Core definition Various intellectual/ethical positionings that focus on the importance of human life, the significance of human experience, and the capacity of individuals to understand their worth and develop their potential. Longer explanation Where does ultimate power lie? With God, with spirits, …
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Humanism is one of those gigantic “umbrella” terms that can mean just about anything. In literary studies, humanism basically refers to a philosophical perspective that places the human, rather than the divine or the natural, at the center of investigation: humanists are interested in what humans…
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Full text Article HUMANISM

From The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics
PROTAGORAS said that ‘man is the measure of all things’, but it was only really during the Renaissance period in Europe that education began to shift away from the study of God towards the study of humanity. There was interest in the relationship of humans to nature, a confidence in…
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Full text Article humanism

From Encyclopedia of Ethics
Today the word “humanism” is understood to mean primarily a system of thought focusing on the value and welfare of the human race, but this usage is not found until the middle of the nineteenth century. “Humanism” and the much older word “humanist” were first used in a largely educational context. …
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Full text Article Humanism

From Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology
The term ‘humanism’ was coined in the nineteenth century to characterize a movement associated in the first instance with a set of thinkers in fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Europe who called themselves ‘humanists’. Figures usually viewed as representative of early modern humanism include F. …
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Full text Article Humanism

From The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion
Over the centuries, the meaning of the term humanism has shifted from a certain literary and even moral sensibility, to a loosely defined philosophical movement, a particular kind of education and a proxy for secular values. An early expression of humanism gained visibility during the Italian…
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Full text Article Humanism

From The Classical Tradition
The word humanism was first used in a fully theorized way in 1808, when the German educator Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer employed it to argue for the importance of a secondary educational system based on the Greek and Roman classics ( Niethammer 1808 ; Campana 1946 ; Kristeller 1956 ). A…
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Full text Article humanism

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
philosophical and literary movement in which man and his capabilities are the central concern. The term was originally restricted to a point of view prevalent among thinkers in the Renaissance. The distinctive characteristics of Renaissance humanism were its emphasis on classical studies, or the…
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