Historian Connects Modern Humanism to the Enlightenment

[cleanhippie]

AMHERST, NY—In a groundbreaking work of scholarship in the April/May 2012 edition of Free Inquiry titled “The Enlightenment, Naturalism, and the Secularization of Values,” historian Alan Charles Kors describes the evolution of thought and inquiry that led to the Enlightenment, and how the new conceptions of a secular morality set forth in the Enlightenment would blossom into what we now know today as modern humanism. Voices in the humanist movement frequently and proudly hearken back to the thinkers of the Enlightenment as their philosophical forebears, but little has been documented that explicitly spells out this connection, until now.

Kors, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and editor of The Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, tells the story of a Europe emerging bruised by centuries of sectarian strife and violence, and therefore increasingly receptive to the thoroughly modern concept of tolerance of diversity. “It is a remarkable moment of the history of human consciousness,” writes Kors, “this generation that thought of itself as leading Europe from a phantasmagoric past into a world closer to the heart’s desire for happiness.”

Enlightenment-era thought challenged a long-hold belief in the presumptive authority of the Church and its clerics. Kors explains, “Anticlericalism was the most common denominator of the Enlightenment. Primarily deistic, it believed that God spoke to mankind through nature and nature alone and that the priests had usurped and falsified God’s voice in sectarian religions.” This idea that the nature of reality could be understood through careful, reasoned inquiry and experimentation, rather than through religious doctrine, serves as the underpinning for the secular humanist movement.

Gordon Gamm, a lawyer and longtime humanist activist, generously provided the funding for this essay and assisted Free Inquiry in commissioning this essay.

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/newsroom/historian_connects_modern_humanism_to_the_enlightenment/

[trotsky]

1. This just in: trotsky connects jumping in water to getting wet.

Watch for my upcoming book!

[edhopper]

2. Just got my issue today.

It looks like a very interesting read. Trosky not withstanding

[Adsos Letter]

3. Kors produced an excellent lecture series for The Teaching Company.

Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries.

One of my favorite series.