Humanism

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Humanism. On the 3rd January 106 BC Marcus Tullius Cicero, lawyer, politician, Roman philosopher and the founding father of Humanism was born. His academy, the Studia Humanitas taught ‘the art of living well and blessedly through learning and instruction in the fine arts’, his version of ‘humanitas’ put man not God at the centre of the world.Centuries later, Cicero’s teachings had been metamorphosed into ‘Classical Humanism’, a faith in the soft arts of the Greek world. But how did Cicero’s ideas become Renaissance ideals? How did a small Greek curriculum later become a world philosophy? The human centred creed is credited with giving us human rights and democracy but has also been blamed for the most unspeakable horrors of the modern age. Have his ideas been distorted through the centuries for political ends? And why do some contemporary thinkers think the Humanist tradition is responsible for Elitism, Sexism and even Nazism?

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Tony Davies No other episodes
  Professor and Head of the Department of English, University of Birmingham
• Lisa Jardine 8 episodes
  Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary College, University of London and Honorary Fellow of Kings College Cambridge
• Simon Goldhill 8 episodes
  Reader in Greek Literature and Culture at Kings College Cambridge

Related episodes

• Cicero
  
  25 Jan, 2018 930 History of the Ancient World
• Socrates
  
  27 Sep, 2007 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Stoicism
  
  3 Mar, 2005 100 Philosophy
• The Individual
  
  21 Oct, 1999 100 Philosophy
• Seneca the Younger
  
  23 Feb, 2017 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Aristotle’s Politics
  
  6 Nov, 2008 320 Political science
• Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
  
  2 Nov, 2023 170 Ethics
• Common Sense Philosophy
  
  21 Jun, 2007 100 Philosophy
• Marcus Aurelius
  
  25 Feb, 2021 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Virtue
  
  28 Feb, 2002 170 Ethics
• Erasmus
  
  9 Feb, 2012 270 History of Christianity
• Alcuin
  
  30 Jan, 2020 270 History of Christianity
• Neoplatonism
  
  19 Apr, 2012 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• St Thomas Aquinas
  
  17 Sep, 2009 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• The Artist
  
  28 Mar, 2002 700 Arts
• The Pelagian Controversy
  
  21 Apr, 2011 270 History of Christianity
• The Etruscan Civilisation
  
  29 Sep, 2011 930 History of the Ancient World
• Confucius
  
  1 Nov, 2001 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• William Hazlitt
  
  8 Apr, 2010 820 English and Old English literatures
• Roman Satire
  
  22 Apr, 2010 870 Latin and Italic literatures

---

Programme ID: p00547bk

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547bk

Auto-category: 190 (Modern Western philosophy)