Aspects of Humanism : An eight week course

Humanists have no official doctrine. Humanism is a loose family of views, united by the thought that the business of living is usually and on the whole worthwhile, and that belief in supernatural beings has nothing to offer people who are trying to live well. The thoughts gathered in these notes and lectures are not intended to supply a Humanist creed. Rather, they are an attempt to think through some of the issues that arise for Humanists today, and to present them in a way that will stimulate others to work out their own ideas. Inevitably, they reflect my own concerns and opinions. As the intention is to stimulate debate, I have in many cases left matters open. Where I offer a definite opinion, I do so in the expectation (and hope) that others will disagree with it, discuss it and improve on it. Please feel free to send me your comments at [email protected] Your course leader will organise your in-class activities and explain how your group will use these course materials. I want to make just one suggestion: bring a notebook and pen. Use it during meetings to record your thoughts about the topics under discussion and your reasons for holding (or changing) your views. If you can’t make up your mind about some question, try to write down precisely what is holding you up. That way, you will build up a private journal of your thoughts about Humanism, and make connections among the topics and between the course and your prior knowledge and experience. No-one will read it or try to make you read it aloud. There is no textbook for this course, but for each week, I have picked out a reading from a relevant book and these have been collected together in a Sourcebook accompanying this Handbook. I am grateful to Andrew Copson and the South Place Ethical Society, British Humanist Association and Rationalist Association for inviting me to prepare this course. I hope you enjoy working through it as much as I did. I am also grateful to the Humanist Philosophers’ Group for giving me plenty to think about. Graduates of the University of Hertfordshire philosophy programme will recognise some of the material here

The pragmatics of defining religion in a multi-cultural world

Few seem to have difficulty in distinguishing between religious and secular institutions, yet there is widespread disagreement regarding what "religion" actually means. Indeed, some go so far as to question whether there is anything at all distinctive about religions. Hence, formulating a definition of "religion" that can command wide assent has proven to be an extremely difficult task. In this article I consider the most prominent of the many rival definitions that have been proposed, the majority falling within three basic types: intellectual, affective and functional definitions. I conclude that there are pragmatic reasons for favouring the formerly popular view that essentialist definitions of "religions" are inadequate, and that religions should be construed, instead, as possessing a number of "family resemblances". In so arguing, I provide a response to the view that there is nothing distinctive about religions, as well as to the recent claim that religions do not exist

And Now A Word About Secular Humanism, Spirituality, and the Practice of Justice and Conflict Resolution

The papers presented in this Dialogue raise very important and moving questions about the relationship of spirituality, moral values, and religion to the practice of law generally, and the practice of conflict resolution specifically. In this Commentary, I want to focus on two related questions: First, where do our moral values, spirituality, and sense of communion or connection come from? And second, how do values derived from various sources of secular humanism inform our practices? For some of us, organized religion is not the primary source of our commitment to the moral values that inform our legal and conflict resolution practices, but other values or values surprisingly similar to religious values do inform our work. This Commentary addresses some of those alternative sources of spiritual values, as used by the participants in this Dialogue

The Middle Way versus Extremism

Extremism is a perennial problem in our civilisation. It has constantly impeded our progress by leading to unnecessary wars, conflicts, enmity and hatred. Understanding the middle way between these two extremes helps us to clarify what extremism is and how it arises. Such an understanding can be made part of the education system so that children are taught from an early age to detect extremist tendencies in their own thinking and to control them for their own good and the good of society. This paper extends the views expressed in my book, The Promise of Dualism (Almostic Publications) and other papers on the subject of extremism. It is focused on the following table which shows how the middle way stands between the extremes of too much power and too much belief. After the introduction, the rest of this paper explicates this table’s contents in considerable detail – line by line and word by word – in explanatory notes

“Total and Radical Liberation”: The Religious and Philosophical Background of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Revolutionary Ideas

The article explores the religious and philosophical origins of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s ideas of “honesty with oneself,” “omnilateral liberation,” and “concordism.” Two treatises, Vidrodzhennia natsii (Rebirth of a Nation, 1919–1920) and Konkordyzm. Systema buduvannia shchastia (Concordism. A System of Building Happiness, 1938–1945), illustrate the development of Vynnychenko’s worldview. In the first work, social revolution was considered as the answer to human problems, while, in the second, such a solution was found in becoming one with the universe. Despite his negative attitude towards religion, Volodymyr Vynnychenko actively used religious images and patterns in his writings. For instance, criticizing Christianity for its dogmatism, he nevertheless created his codex of thirteen rules of concordism, which had to harmonize the unbalanced forces of mankind with the universe. In this context, particular attention is paid to the significant influence of pagan concepts on Vynnychenko’s thinking

Living with Mystery: Virtue, Truth, and Practice

This paper examines how a person’s life may be shaped by living with a sense of the mystery of reality. What virtues, if any, are encouraged by such a sense? The first section rehearses a radical ”doctrine of mystery’, according to which reality as it anyway is, independently of human perspectives, is ineffable. It is then argued that a sense of mystery may provide ”measure’ for human lives. For it is possible for a life to be ”consonant’ with this sense -- through exercising humility, for example -- and even to emulate mystery. A further section corrects a misunderstanding about the connection between a sense of mystery and the virtues it invites, while a final section considers the relationship between living with mystery and religious faith

Early Modern Political Philosophies and the Shaping of Political Economy

In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the paradigm of a new science, political economy, was established. It was a science distinct from the Aristotelian sub-disciplines of practical philosophy named oikonomía and politiké, and emphasis on its character of science not unlike the natural sciences – still called ‘natural philosophy’ – mirrored precisely a willingness to stress its autonomy from two other sub-disciplines of practical philosophy, that is, ethics and politics. However, the new science resulted from a transformation of part of traditional practical philosophy, allowing the inclusion of bodies of knowledge accumulated by experts of commerce and public finance. Such bodies of knowledge were unified by the (true or alleged) discovery of regularities, mechanisms, causal connections making for a new partial order within the overall social order. How far this paved the way to a science similar to mathematics rather left a normative discipline as alive as ever was a recurrent question for at least a century, until the marginalist revolution opened the way for a sharp division, leaving ‘economics’ as a science of causes and effects facing ‘economic policy’ as a discourse on ends

Economia Civile

The present booklet puts together a few short contributions on the recent work by Stefano Zamagni and Luigino Bruni on the notion of civil economy. Among recent works by historians (perhaps the best known is Robert Putnam’s work on the Italian civic tradition), economists and social scientists, the book here discussed deserves a special place for delving into the history of economic thought as a method of finding new ways and establishing new paradigms in economic theorizing. After an introductory exposé by the editor, the booklet hosts a comment by Gloria Vivenza (University of Verona) which traces some the Classical roots of the notion of civil economy. Thomas Hobbes notoriously changed the phrase homo homini deus, which is sometimes quoted from Caecilius Statius, into homo homini lupus. The latter also, indeed, comes from Roman playwriters and is commonly attributed to Plautus. Today we have to go back to Statius’s sentence if we aim at an understanding of reciprocity, which is the core concept of this book. Gloria Vivenza, as a scholar on the Greek and Roman background of Political Economy, is an excellent guide in the field. The subsequent comment by Roberto Scazzieri (University of Bologna, now visiting at the University of Cambridge) puts the notion of civil economy in context with some of main strands of economic thought in the 18th century. In particular Scazzieri’s contribution highlights similarities and differences between the Italian civic tradition and the Scottish paradigm. Finally a young scholar from the Bocconi University, Francesco Boldizzoni, adds his remarks on the formative stages of the civic humanist paradigm in Italy and on the proliferation of the paradigm in Europe and, more particularly, in Britain. This booklet is closed by ‘conclusions’ by the authors of the book. The comments given here were first presented at the 8th annual Conference of ESHET, the European Society of the History of Economic Thought, held in Treviso 27-29 February 2004. A special session of the Treviso Conference was organized by the editor the present booklet on the concept of Economia civile. Thanks are due to the authors of the various comments for readily making their texts available for reproduction in this booklet. An obligation must be recorded also to dr. Elisa Portale, who has been helpful in the editing of this booklet.