According to bestselling historian Yuval Noah Harari, today’s average American has their foot in three ideological camps: nationalism, free market capitalism, and humanism. The first two might seem obvious, but the third? It’s entirely possible that most who qualify for that label would be hard pressed to explain its meaning, much less use it self-descriptively. This book is designed to serve two important purposes: First, to provide an accessible resource for anyone curious about the humanist tradition and the arguments advanced by leading contemporary proponents. Second, to address what the author believes is a critical question for our time, the era of the Anthropocene: Is humanism’s seemingly benign package of values at least partially responsible for some of the world’s most pressing problems? To answer the last question, Schuler draws from an elective collection of commentators, including life scientists, spiritual writers, public intellectuals, technologists, novelists, and even poets. In the end, this wide-ranging survey will help the reader determine whether humanism makes sense for them.

Reexamining Emmanuel Levinas's essays on Jewish education, Claire Elise Katz provides new insights into the importance of education and its potential to transform a democratic society, for Levinas's larger philosophical project. Katz examines Levinas's "Crisis of Humanism," which motivated his effort to describe a new ethical subject. Taking into account his multiple influences on social science and the humanities, and his various identities as a Jewish thinker, philosopher, and educator, Katz delves deeply into Levinas's works to understand the grounding of this ethical subject.

Highlighting literature and philosophy's potential impact on economics, health care, bioethics, public policy and theology, this book analyses the heuristic value of fiction. It alerts us to how we risk succumbing to the deceptions of fiction in our everyday lives, because fictional representations constantly feign to be of the real and claim a reality of their own. Philosophy and literature disclose how the substantive sphere of social, economic and medical practice is sometimes driven and shaped by the affect-ridden and subjective. Analysing a wide range of literature-from Augustine, Shakespeare, Spinoza and Deleuze to Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, W. G. Sebald and Jonathan Littell-Michael Mack rethinks ethical attitudes towards the long or eternal life. In so doing he shows how philosophy and literature turn representation against itself to expose the hollowness of theologically grand concepts that govern our secular approach towards ethics, economics and medicine. Philosophy and literature help us resist our current infatuation with numbers and the numerical and contribute towards a future politics that is at once singular and diverse.

Eric Hayot argues that it is time to make a positive case for what the humanities are and what they can become. Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our world.

Drawing on the early correspondence of Martin Luther, Timothy Dost presents a reassessment of the degree to which humanism influenced the thinking of this key reformation figure. Studying letters written by Luther between 1507 and 1522, he explores the various ways Luther used humanism and humanist techniques in his writings and the effect of these influences on his developing religious beliefs. The letters used in this study, many of which have never before been translated into English, focus on Luther's thoughts, attitudes and application of humanism, uncovering the extent to which he used humanist devices to develop his understanding of the gospel. Although there have been other studies of Luther and humanism, few have been grounded in such a close philological examination of Luther's writings. Combining a sound knowledge of recent historiography with a detailed familiarity with Luther's correspondence, Dost provides a sophisticated contribution to the field of reformation studies.

Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren advances Marcuse scholarship by presenting four hitherto untranslated and unpublished manuscripts by Herbert Marcuse from the Frankfurt University Archive on themes of economic value theory, socialism, and humanism. Contributors to this edited collection, notably Peter Marcuse, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Zvi Tauber, Arnold L. Farr and editor, Charles Reitz, are deeply engaged with the foundational theories of Marcuse and Marx with regard to a future of freedom, equality, and justice. Douglas Dowd furnishes the critical historical context with regard to U.S. foreign and domestic policy, particularly its features of economic imperialism and militarism. Reitz draws these elements together to show that the writings by Herbert Marcuse and these formidable authors can ably assist a global movement toward intercultural commonwealth. The collection extends the critical theories of Marcuse and Marx to an analysis of the intensifying inequalities symptomatic of our current economic distress. It presents a collection of essays by radical scholars working in the public interest to develop a critical analysis of recent global economic dislocations. Reitz presents a new foundation for emancipatory practice—a labor theory of ethics and commonwealth, and the collection breaks new ground by constructing a critical theory of wealth and work. A central focus is building a new critical vision for labor, including academic labor. Lessons are drawn to inform transformative political action, as well as the practice of a critical, multicultural pedagogy, supporting a new manifesto for radical educators contributed by Peter McLaren. The collection is intended especially to appeal to contemporary interests of college students and teachers in several interrelated social science disciplines: sociology, social problems, economics, ethics, business ethics, labor education, history, political philosophy, multicultural education, and critical pedagogy.

In 1632, the Amsterdam regents founded an Athenaeum or 'Illustrious School'. This kind of institution provided academic teaching, although it could not grant degrees and had no compulsory four-faculty system. Athenaeums proliferated in the first century after the Dutch Revolt, but few of them survived long. They have been interpreted as the manifestation of an evolving vision of the role of a higher education; this book, by contrast, argues that education at the Amsterdam Athenaeum was staunchly traditional both in methods and in substance. While religious, philosophical and scientific disputes rocked contemporary Dutch learned society, this analysis of letters, orations and disputations reveals that a traditional and Aristotelian humanism thrived at the Athenaeum until well into the seventeenth century.