To centralize our information on the most common definitions of humanism for discussing the Humanism article, here is a table for editors with copy-pasted dictionary and encyclopedia definitions of the term. For ease of browsing, the rows are color-coded based on how strongly the source equates humanism with some form of secular humanism.
- Red (2) = The source treats secular humanism as the sole definition of humanism.
- Pink (5) = The source treats secular humanism as the primary (or first) definition, but allows for other types or forms of humanism.
- Light blue (9) = The source's primary definition of humanism is not secular, but the source does reference secular humanism in some way.
- Dark blue (4) = The source defines humanism without any reference to secularism, naturalism, etc.
(Wiktionary, incidentally, happens to qualify as 'light blue', like most dictionaries.)
| Source | Definition(s) |
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| American Heritage Dictionary [1] |
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| Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary [2] |
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| Cambridge Companion to Philosophy | Not a school of thought or a collection of specific beliefs or doctrines, humanism is rather a general perspective from which the world is viewed. That perspective received a gradual yet persistent articulation during different historical periods and continued to furnish a central leitmotif of Western civilization. It comes into focus when it is compared with two competing positions. One the one hand, it can be contrasted with the emphasis on the supernatural, transcendent domain which considers humanity to be dependent on divine order. On the other hand, it resists the tendency to treat humanity scientifically as part of the natural order, on a par with other living organisms. Humanism discerns in human beings unique capacities and abilities, to be cultivated and celebrated for their own sake. |
| Cambridge Dictionary of American English [3] |
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| Catholic Encyclopedia | Humanism is the name given to the intellectual, literary, and scientific movement of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, a movement which aimed at basing every branch of learning on the literature and culture of classical antiquity. |
| Chambers Dictionary [4] |
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| Collins Essential English Dictionary [5] |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia [6] | philosophical and literary movement in which man and his capabilities are the central concern. The term was originally restricted to a point of view prevalent among thinkers in the Renaissance. The distinctive characteristics of Renaissance humanism were its emphasis on classical studies, or the humanities, and a conscious return to classical ideals and forms. The movement led to a restudy of the Scriptures and gave impetus to the Reformation. The term humanist is applied to such diverse men as Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Lorenzo de' Medici, Erasmus, and Thomas More. In the 20th cent., F. C. S. Schiller and Irving Babbitt applied the term to their own thought. Modern usage of the term has had diverse meanings, but some contemporary emphases are on lasting human values, cultivation of the classics, and respect for scientific knowledge. |
| Compact Oxford English Dictionary |
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| Encyclopædia Britannica | term freely applied to a variety of beliefs, methods, and philosophies that place central emphasis on the human realm. Most frequently, however, the term is used with reference to a system of education and mode of inquiry that developed in northern Italy during the 14th century and later spread through Europe and England. |
| Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Humanism is the philosophical and literary movement which originated in Italy in the second half of the fourteenth century and diffused into the other countries of Europe, coming to constitute one of the factors of modern culture. |
| Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English [7] |
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| Microsoft Encarta [8] | in philosophy, attitude that emphasizes the dignity and worth of the individual. A basic premise of humanism is that people are rational beings who possess within themselves the capacity for truth and goodness. The term humanism is most often used to describe a literary and cultural movement that spread through western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. |
| Oxford Companion to Philosophy New Edition, Ted Honderich, editor | The tendency to emphasize man and his status, importance, powers, achievements, interests, or authority. Humanism has many different connotations, which depend largely on what it is being contrasted with. As well as denoting particular claims about man it can also denote the tendency to study man at all. Early Greek thought began by studying the cosmos as a whole and particular phenomena in it, such as the weather, earthquakes, etc. and then turned to questions of logic and metaphysics, but the so-called humanist movement arose in the fifth century BC when the Sophists and Socrates “called philosophy down to earth,” as Cicero later put it, by introducing political, and moral questions.
Humanism is also associated with the Renaissance, when it denoted a move away from God to man as the center of interest. God still remained as creator and supreme authority – the Renaissance humanists were far from being atheists – but his activity was seen as less immediate, more general control than as day-to-day interference, and this enabled a scientific outlook to arise which saw the universe as governed by general laws, albeit these were laid down by God. (A rather similar development had occurred earlier when the Stoics relied on the notion of an impersonal fate to provide the stability needed for a coherent description of the world.) One feature which made this specifically a humanist development was the emphasis in both the ability of man to find out about the universe by his own efforts, and more and more to control it. It was when the conflict between science and religion arose in the nineteenth century, largely because of Darwinism's inconsistency with a fundamentalist reading of the Bible that humanism acquired its modern association with atheism or agnosticism. Humanism, often called scientific humanism, then becomes associated with rationalism, not in its main philosophical senses but in that of an appeal to reason in contrast to revelation or religious authority as a means of finding out about the natural world and the nature and destiny of man, and also as giving a grounding for morality. However this appeal to reason in ethics should be distinguished from that common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and not without echoes in the twentieth, where reason was opposed not to religious authority but to feelings or emotions. Some humanists in fact demur at the title "rationalist" or "scientific humanism" because, though they are quite willing to follow reason rather than authority or revelation (and for that reason willing call themselves humanists at all), they do not accept that reason can provide the basis for morality, but may appeal to feelings or emotions instead; in fact throughout their histories the British Humanist Association and the Rationalist Press Association have been independent entities, though allied on most issues. Humanists may also reject the implication in the title "scientific humanist” that science can at least ultimately answer all questions (see Nationalism and Positivism). Humanist ethics are also distinguished by placing the end of moral action in the welfare of humanity rather than in fulfilling the will of God.--ARL |
| Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, , Simon Blackburn, editor, (1996), p. 178 | Most generally, any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding. More particularly, the movement distinctive of the Renaissance and allied to the renewed study of Greek and Roman literature: a rediscovery of the unity of human beings and nature, and a renewed celebration of the pleasures of life, all supposed lost in the medieval world. Humanism in this Renaissance sense was quite consistent with religious belief, it being supposed that God had put us here precisely in order to further those things the humanists found important. Later the term tended to become appropriated for anti-religious social and political movements. Finally, in the late 20th century, humanism is sometimes used as a pejorative term by postmodernist and especially feminist writers, applied to philosophies such as that of Sartre that rely upon the possibility of the autonomous, self-conscious, rational, single self, and that are supposedly insensitive to the inevitable fragmentary, splintered, historically conditioned nature of personality and motivation. |
| Oxford English Dictionary |
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| Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy |
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| Oxford: Ologies and Isms - A Dictionary of Word Beginnings and Endings |
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| Philosophy Dictionary [9] | Most generally, any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and either optimistic about the powers of human reason, or at least insistent that we have no alternative but to use it as best we can. More particularly, the movement distinctive of the Renaissance and allied to the renewed study of Greek and Roman literature: a rediscovery of the unity of human beings and nature, and a renewed celebration of the pleasures of life, all supposed lost in the medieval world. Humanism in this Renaissance sense was quite consistent with religious belief, it being supposed that God had put us here precisely in order to further those things the humanists found important. Later the term tended to become appropriated for anti-religious social and political movements. Finally, in the late 20th century, humanism is sometimes used as a pejorative term by postmodernist and especially feminist writers, applied to philosophies such as that of Sartre, that rely upon the possibility of the autonomous, selfconscious, rational, single self, and that are supposedly insensitive to the inevitable fragmentary, splintered, historically and socially conditioned nature of personality and motivation. |
| Random House Dictionary |
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| Webster's Dictionary |
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