Wiki says:
Sixth-century BCE pre-Socratic Greek philosophers Thales of Miletus and
Xenophanes of Colophon were the first to attempt to explain the world in terms
of human reason rather than myth and tradition, thus can be said to be the
first Greek humanists. Thales questioned the notion of anthropomorphic gods and
Xenophanes refused to recognize the gods of his time and reserved the divine
for the principle of unity in the universe. These Ionian Greeks were the first
thinkers to assert that nature is available to be studied separately from the
supernatural realm. Anaxagoras brought philosophy and the spirit of rational
inquiry from Ionia to Athens. Pericles, the leader of Athens during the period
of its greatest glory was an admirer of Anaxagoras. Other influential
pre-Socratics or rational philosophers include Protagoras (like Anaxagoras a
friend of Pericles), known for his famous dictum "man is the measure of all
things" and Democritus, who proposed that matter was composed of atoms. Little
of the written work of these early philosophers survives and they are known
mainly from fragments and quotations in other writers, principally Plato and
Aristotle. The historian Thucydides, noted for his scientific and rational
approach to history, is also much admired by later humanists.[12] In the third
century BCE, Epicurus became known for his concise phrasing of the problem of
evil, lack of belief in the afterlife, and human-centered approaches to
achieving eudaimonia. He was also the first Greek philosopher to admit women to
his school as a rule.
Wiki says:
Active in the early 1920s, F.C.S. Schiller labeled his work "humanism" but for
Schiller the term referred to the pragmatist philosophy he shared with William
James. In 1929, Charles Francis Potter founded the First Humanist Society of
New York whose advisory board included Julian Huxley, John Dewey, Albert
Einstein and Thomas Mann. Potter was a minister from the Unitarian tradition
and in 1930 he and his wife, Clara Cook Potter, published Humanism: A New
Religion. Throughout the 1930s, Potter was an advocate of such liberal causes
as, women’s rights, access to birth control, "civil divorce laws", and an end
to capital punishment.[43]
Pirsig says:
"Man is the measure of all things." Yes, that's what he is saying about
Quality. Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would
say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists
and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a
relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the
creation of all things.
The one thing that doesn't fit what he says and what Plato said about the
Sophists is their profession of teaching virtue. All accounts indicate this was
absolutely central to their teaching, but how are you going to teach virtue if
you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue if it implies anything at
all, implies an ethical absolute. . . .
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical
relativism. Not pristine virtue. But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the
Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before
dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the
Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of
rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along. . . .
dmb says:
See?
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