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The Road to Reason:
Landmarks in the Evolution of Humanist Thought
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by Pat
Duffy Hutcheon
(Ottawa: Canadian Humanist Publications, 2001)
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Pat
Hutcheon is a sociologist with degrees from Canadian universities
and a doctorate from the University of Queensland in Australia. She
has taught and written about the sociology of education at various
universities in the United States and Canada. The eighteen essays
collected in this volume, she tells us, were written at various
times for a variety of purposes. They have all been previously
published in different magazines and journals, including Free
Inquiry, The Humanist, and Humanist in Canada. Dr. Hutcheon was
named Canadian Humanist of the Year in 2000 and received the
Humanist Distinguished Service Award from the American Humanist
Association the following year.
In this book humanist thought spans
two-and-a-half millennia from the present back to the Buddha
(563-483?? BCE). The Buddha you say, didn't he start a religion, how
does he get to be a landmark of humanism? Buddhism is generally
considered a religion without gods. His thought can been interpreted
as "a world view in profound opposition to the Animistic,
mystical and absolutist beliefs prevailing throughout human history,
not only in Asia but in Western cultures as well."(p. 1) Still,
some of Hutcheon's selections strike me as odd. Was Confucius
(551-479 BCE) really a "Pioneering Humanist" even though
he recommended the worship of the traditional Chinese deities. He
was an ethical philosopher, who emphasized the concrete rather than
the abstract, and most of all provided a practical guide for
everyday behavior.
The Roman Lucretius (98-55 BCE) and
the Greek Epicurus (341-270 BCE) surely were important humanists. So
was Omar Khayyam (1050-1122) a worldly unbeliever. Michel de
Montaigne (1533-1592) is praised as a clear thinker who applied
rational inquiry against the mysticism of the sixteenth century. The
Unitarians have deep roots in the thought and philosophy of
classical antiquity. They can also look back on a long history of
many martyrs and religious persecution since the beginning of the
Renaissance.
In the modern period two selections
astonished me. I had never heard of Harriet Martineau (1802-1876).
Hutecheon describes her as "an early nineteenth-century
novelist, journalist, social reformer, educator, children's writer,
philosopher of naturalism, environmentalist, social scientist, and
pioneering feminist who published over fifty books and almost two
thousand articles and newspaper columns."(p. 59) I would think
the theologian and missionary Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) does not
qualify as a humanist. Hutecheon includes him as a humanistic
philosopher who emphasized the ethical teachings of Jesus rather
than the religious strictures of Christianity. A man who strove
throughout his life to reconcile scientific and scholarly insight
with religious beliefs. Even as his own scholarly insight destroyed
any historic meaning of the New Testament.
Many of Hutcheons selections are major
figures of humanist thought and well known to us. David Hume
(1711-1776), the beacon of enlightenment philosophy is there. So is
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), Darwins German bulldog, John Dewey
(1859-1952), Julian Huxley (1887-1975), Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
and Albert Camus.(1913-1960). She provides sketches of some of our
contemporaries, Carl Sagan (1934-1999), Isaac Asimov (1920-1992),
Edward O. Wilson (1929), and Richard Dawkins (1941). A feast of
humanist thought and history. I recommend it.
Wolf Roder |
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