What is "humanitas"

Humanitas is a Latin noun meaning human nature, civilization and kindness.

Humanitas is an independent Romanian publishing house, founded on February 1, 1990 (after the Romanian Revolution) in Bucharest by the philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu, based on a state-owned publishing house, Editura Politică. Its slogan is Humanitas, bunul gust al libertăţii ("Humanitas, the good taste of freedom").

During its first years, Humanitas mainly published authors from the Romanian diaspora, whose works had been subject to censorship or banning in Communist Romania; they include Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade, and Eugène Ionesco.

Currently, Humanitas publishes literature, books on philosophy, religion, social and political sciences, history, memoirs, popular science, children's literature, and self-help books.

Humanitas may refer to:

• The word humanitas, created by Cicero to describe a good human
• Humanitas (publishing house), a Romanian publishing house
• Humanitas (journal)
• Humanitas Prize, an award given to motion pictures and television shows
• Humanitas University, a private medical school in Rozzano (Milan), Italy
• HUMANITAS (Grand Lodge), a German grand lodge in the Liberal Masonic tradition
• The Humanitas Programme, a series of Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge
• Humanitas Netherlands, a nonprofit association to support people who, for a range of reasons, temporarily can not manage on their own

Humanitas is an interdisciplinary journal published by the National Humanities Institute. It is known for its affiliation with traditionalist conservatism.

The journal seeks to foster among its readers and contributors a spirit of open inquiry, a willingness to subject cherished doctrines to challenge and look beyond conventional categories of thought. Humanitas explores issues of moral and social philosophy, epistemology, and aesthetics, and the relations among them, such as the moral and cultural conditions of knowledge. Favorable to an historical understanding of life, Humanitas explores the simultaneous tension and union between universality and particularity, and the interdependence and opposition of creativity and tradition. Fruitful new thinking will resist reductionism and will, for example, distinguish between contrasting strains within modernity and postmodernity.

Its editors are Joseph Baldacchino and Claes G. Ryn.