In favor of individual agency

Usage examples of humanist.

Barry and I occasionally joked about the faith thing, about his being a True Believer and me the quintessential agnostic, a secular humanist.

Anthony Ascham, a sixteenth-century alchemist and astrologer and the brother of Roger Ascham, the humanist tutor to Edward VI and Elizabeth I.

Even in the later schoolmen, like Biel and Occam, still more in the humanists, one finds a much stronger rationalism than in the representative thinkers of the Middle Ages.

In the fifteenth century the influence of Huss and the humanists had in different ways formed channels facilitating the inrush of Lutheranism.

That love that the humanists considered the supreme form of the expression of intelligence was posed by Spinoza as the only possible foundation of the liberation of singularities and as the ethical cement of collective life.

Sovereignty is thus defined both by transcendence and by representation, two concepts that the humanist tradition has posed as contradictory.

It should be added that doubtless the old hard line attitudes against stylistics still exist too, but in recent years structuralism and post-structuralism, rather than stylistics, have usually been seen as the major threat to traditional values in criticism, with the consequence that most liberal humanist polemical writing has been directed at these targets.

Marxist critic, or a structuralist, or a stylistician, or some such, then you are probably a liberal humanist, whether or not you admit or recognise this.

Hence, the liberal humanist notion of unique, individual selfhood is deconstructed.

So instead of going straight into the content, in the liberal humanist manner, the structuralist presents a series of parallels, echoes, reflections, patterns, and contrasts, so that the narrative becomes highly schematised, is translated, in fact, into what we might call a verbal diagram.

PRE-REFORMERS The men who, in later ages, claimed for their ancestors a Protestantism older than the Augsburg Confession, referred its origins not to the mystics nor to the humanists, but to bold leaders branded by the church as heretics.

Peace was a value that in a short stretch of time had lost the humanist, Erasmian connotations that had previously made it the path of transformation.

Luther proclaimed that chastity was impossible, while the humanists gloried in the flesh.

In other words, Schopenhauer recognizes Kantianism as the definitive liquidation of the humanist revolution.

He did not share the dislike of Aristotle manifested by most of the humanists, for he shrewdly suspected that what was offensive in the Stagyrite was due more to his scholastic translators and commentators than to himself.