The Human Prospect is a peer-reviewed, indexed journal focused on the development and refinement of humanist values and ethics, as well as ways the humanist movement can foster them throughout society. It also covers new scientific evidence, theories, and conclusions, as well as their impact upon and relationship to society, values, and ethics.
Humanism and the struggle for civil rights in the United States have had much in common. Martin Luther King Jr. is considered to have been a Christian humanist, while other civil rights leaders have been more secularly inclined. The political activist life of the late civil rights organizer and secular humanist James Forman is memorialized.
Quentin Crisp’s name is not often brought up in humanist circles, and yet he lived his whole life as a unique, courageous and exemplary humanist. He wasn’t affiliated with humanists in any formal way, yet from an early age—without mentors to inspire or to guide him—from the depths inherent in his stalwart inner core, his humanism and compassion blazed unremittingly. Starting with himself. He was born in 1908 and lived for most of the 20th century.
Socrates was one of the most influential philosophers of antiquity, so much so that the whole history of Western philosophy is divided into pre-Socraticism and what came after. In this paper I argue that Socrates anticipated a number of ideas pertinent to contemporary humanism, though of course it would be anachronistic to consider him a humanist in the modern sense of the word. Specifically, what makes Socrates a humanist senso lato are five characteristics of his thinking: his social and moral criticism, his focus on personal integrity and an ethics of virtue, his rejection of the supernatural as a source of morality, his epistemic humility and search for wisdom, and his critical thinking approach to every question. Twenty four centuries after his death, we still have much to learn from Socrates.
