Sarah Bakewell (About | Sarah Bakewell) has provided the reader with a really useful and enjoyable history of humanist freethinking over the past 700 years in this book.
The author begins in the 14th century in southern Italy with Petrarch and Boccaccio, who both revived interest in classical manuscripts and an appreciation of the achievements of the ancient past. We are then treated to the northern humanists Erasmus and Montaigne in looking at their famous essays. Next are the Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume.
Moving into the last 200 years we meet Harriet Taylor Mill, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, Frederick Douglass, Bertrand Russell, Matthew Arnold, E.M. Forster, and Vasily Grossman, among many others.
Bakewell also makes room to describe anti-humanism – fascists in Italy, blasphemy laws, the dehumanizing effects of the Internet, social media and AI. The assertion of humanist values, how to promote an ethical life without superstition, has been met with resistance every step of the way from interested parties and institutions.
This is a scholarly yet highly accessible read and comes greatly recommended.
Follow up Bakewell’s book with any of the following on the subject of humanism and freethought.
- Norman, Richard On Humanism (2004)
- Gilmore, Myron P. The World of Humanism (1952)
- Scott, Geoffrey The Architecture of Humanism (1969)
- Mouat, Kit What Humanism is About (1963)
- Martindale, Joanna (ed.) English Humanism: Watt to Cowley (1985)
- Davies, Tony Humanism (1997)
- Dickens, A.G. The Age of Humanism and Reformation (1972)
- Greenblatt, Stephen The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (2011)
- Murray, Peter and Linda The Art of the Renaissance (1963)
- Gray, John Seven Types of Atheism (2018)
- Whitmarsh, Tim Battling the Gods (2016)
- Smith, Graeme A Short History of Secularism (2008)
- Le Poidevin, Robin Arguing for Atheism (1996)
- Wilson, A.N. God’s Funeral (1999)
- Gaskin, J.C.A. (ed.) Varieties of Unbelief: From Epicurus to Sartre (1980)
- Hacker, P.M.S. The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature (2021)
- Hecht, Jennifer Doubt: A History (2003)
- Shermer, Michael Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye (2016)
- Sobel, Jordan Howard Logic and Theism (2004)
- Oppy, Graeme Naturalism and Religion (2018)
- Jacoby, Susan Freethinkers (2004)
- Grayling, A.C. The Good Book (2011)
- Grayling, A.C. The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind (2016)
- Grayling, A.C. To Set Prometheus Free: Essays on Religion, Reason and Humanity (2009)
A lecture by A.C. Grayling on humanism is available here AC Grayling – Humanism
A discussion from 2001 about humanism on BBC Radio 4 ‘In Our Time’ is available here BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Humanism With Tony Davies, Professor and Head of the Department of English, University of Birmingham and author of Humanism; Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary College, University of London and Honorary Fellow of Kings College Cambridge; Simon Goldhill, Reader in Greek Literature and Culture at Kings College Cambridge. Chaired by Melvyn Bragg.
Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the ‘hippie trail’ through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex, and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library (The library | Wellcome Collection), London, before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include How to Live: a life of Montaigne, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Prize, and At the Existentialist Café, a New York Times Ten Best Books of 2016. She was also among the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. She now lives in London and Italy with her wife and their family of dogs and chickens.
Check if ‘Humanly Possible‘ by Sarah Bakewell is in stock at your local library here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
First published 2023
464 pages in Chatto & Windus
ISBN-13 : 978-1784741662
Sarah Bakewell