John Dewey's Naturalistic Humanism

"Ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities--to imagination and art. This is the philosophy of Shakespeare and Keats." Art As Experience, 35.

The Intellectual

Defined.

Wittgenstein's Last Words

"Tell them I've had a wonderful life!"

The beauty of these words lies in the fact that they were uttered without irony.

Heroes of Humanism: Abu Yusuf al-Kindi (d. 873 CE)

A distinguishing characteristic of all humanists is their cosmopolitan acceptance of sources of inspiration and authority outside of the traditions they inherited as a consequence of the accidents of their birth. In this regard, al-Kindi was exemplary:

We should not be ashamed of recognizing truth and assimilating it from whatever source it may reach us, even though it might come from earlier generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks truth there is nothing of more value than truth itself. It never cheapens or abases him who searches for it, but ennobles and honors him.

--al-Kindi, On First Philosophy.

Cosmopolitical Thinking

"...when Alexander the Great broadened the Greek horizon beyond its former preoccupation with single cities, we find Stoic philosophers fusing the 'natural' and 'social' orders into a single unit. Everything in the world (they argued) manifests in varied ways an 'order' which expresses the Reason that binds all things together. Social and natural regularities alike are aspects of the same overall cosmos + polis--i.e. cosmopolis. The practical idea that human affairs are influenced by, and proceed in step with heavenly affairs, changes into the philosophical idea, that the structure of Nature reinforces a rational Social Order." --Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 68.

The Road to Cosmopolis

The founding fathers of Cosmopolis are (1) the Hellenistic sages: the Cynics, Epicurus, Lucretius, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Sextus Empiricus; (2) the Muslim humanists: al-Kindi, the "school of Farabi" (from al-Farabi to Ibn Miskawayh), Ghazali, Saadi, and Nasr Abu Zayd; and (3) Montaigne.

The citizens cultivate an urbane, literate, skeptical cosmopolitanism that is perfectly at home with the natural piety of a Spinoza, Thoreau, Tolstoy, or Santayana. Theirs is a humanism of the disenchanted sublime.

Aldous Huxley

"...the ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended, except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit." The Perennial Philosophy, x.