The Evolution of Renaissance Humanists

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Renaissance humanists were fascinated by the idea of moral revival. The word l'unisti has a very specific meaning in Italian, based on those who teach and study Human Studies. It was drawing on classical Greek and Roman sense of what you needed to be a good person. Most Renaissance humanists were not unbelievers; that was extremely rare.

Human beings are small compared to the universe, but we're very important to ourselves. Humanism can be thought of as the idea that human beings are themselves the source of meaningfulness and mattering in our lives, rather than those being granted to us by some higher power. In today's episode, Sarah Bakewell discusses the origin and evolution of this dramatic idea. Humanism turns out to be a complex thing; there are religious humanists and atheistic anti-humanists. Her new book is Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Sarah Bakewell did postgraduate work in philosophy and artificial intelligence before becoming a full-time author. Among her previous books are How to Live: a life of Montaigne, and At the Existentialist Cafe. She has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, as well as the Windham-Campbell Prize in non-fiction.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.