The Blind Spot of Humanism

6min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Even the people who would have identified as humanists would narrowly define humanity. And it took people who were not in those categories to raise their hand and say, wait a minute, we're human beings too. That's an important story in the history of humanism. It's certainly not a straightforward story because there's a tremendous amount of backwards and forwards. There might be very good questions for women but they are actually hopeless on them.

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.