Quillette
•64% Informative
Sarah Bakewell explores the history of humanism in a provocative new book.
She argues that humanists believe there is more than one aspect to the truth.
Desiderius Erasmus: Humanism is about both social and individual enlightenment; it creates the proper conditions for moral and intellectual flourishing.
Both secularism and pluralism came of age with Montaigne , for whom human multifariousness is to be celebrated in itself.
This pluralist outlook anticipates the novelistic tradition, inaugurated by writers like Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote and Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews ( 1742 ) and Tom Jones ( 1749 ).
Antihumanism began in the growing conviction that individuals are dominated by external forces and lack agency in the face of either history or discourse.
It attempted to debunk the ideas of individual agency and universal human nature.
Michel Foucault argued that the human sciences, rooted in Renaissance humanism, were already crumbling.
Bakewell says very little about differing strands of humanism itself.
VR Score
75
Informative language
77
Neutral language
44
Article tone
informal
Language
English
Language complexity
72
Offensive language
possibly offensive
Hate speech
not hateful
Attention-grabbing headline
not detected
Known propaganda techniques
detected
Time-value
long-living
External references
4
Source diversity
4