Humanist Revolution Research Articles

Williams, David. The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading

Williams, David. The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading

Cat’s Cradle and the Threads of Maslow’s Humanistic Meditation

Abraham Maslow used “Toward a Humanistic Biology,” published in 1969, to present his future vision of the challenges humankind would face in the growing isolation of persons from each other and themselves. Depersonalization, polarization, and loneliness amid the state of post-pandemic, mid-culture war, warring nations, plagues of economic hardship, racism, nationalism, immigration rejection, and wading deep into a climate cataclysm may cast people out of their societies, or, alternately, huddled alone within them. Ultimately, political power dictates outcomes, as Maslow points out, along with the fate of the world. Mindfulness and its capacity to create more serene and compassionate mind states may hold a model for a new humanistic revolution.

:The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading

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Environmental Anthropogenic Antibiosis as a Consequence of Urbanisation

Modern ecological risks associated with the anthropological crisis of nature, leading to the paradoxes of the ecological state of humanity, are analyzed. It is substantiated that the unlimited use of natural resources causes a misbalance between human actions and the riches of nature. The question of the necessity of exploring the man-nature relation in the context of humanistic revolution is raised; it allows us to perceive the relation to nature as caring which includes such existential elements as agreement, tolerance, respect, and care. We are discussing an alternative view of the relationship between man and nature in anthropologies of exploitation and violence. It is necessary to realize the value of nature precisely in its ontological intentionality and not because it is valuable solely in terms of utilitarianism and pragmatism. It is determined that over-technological human activity has led to catastrophic changes in large natural areas, destruction of natural water resources, and global warming, which threatens the biosphere and may lead to fundamental changes in the state of nature. The assumption is made that it is impossible to exclude the situation on the existence of the threat of catastrophe between man and nature; at that, the human search for the options of communication and preservation of nature and man, and their anthropological characteristics becomes expedient.

Znaczenie metod komunikacji w medycynie i aptekarstwie z uwzględnieniem wybranych aspektów z historii medycyny i arteterapii

A humanistic turn in world medicine is also observed to the philosophical sources of medical art and referring to extremely important methods of communication. There is more to it than that. The manifestations of the humanistic revolution in medicine include appreciating the patient’s perspective and his participation in the treatment process involving cooperation with medical staff and family, which is especially important in family medicine. The importance of communication methods in medicine and pharmacy is indicated, taking into account selected aspects of the history of medicine and art therapy. Pharmaceutical, medical or nursing activity is an inexhaustible source for ethical and philosophical reflections, also with reference to art. Apart from the communication aspects in view of the confirmed healing effect of art, even an independent scientific discipline has emerged-art therapy. Art has been one of the ways of expression from the beginning myself.

Wege und Irrwege der Europäischen Rationalität. Das Problem der Evidenz

The problem of rationality today means the problem of the inner unreasonableness of reasonableness in the sense of its inner limit. Even the humanistic revolution of the Renaissance gradually led to the replacement of the power of omnipotent faith by faith in the omnipotence of power. It is this general orientation towards power and the cult of power, this new belief in power, that revealed itself more and more sharply in the course of European history and eventually led to extreme forms of expression in the world wars and catastrophes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The activity of free reasonableness has resulted in a host of unreasonable consequences: we have reason to suggest that reasonableness perhaps contains its own negation. Most philosophers of the twentieth century supposed that today it is impossible to think as in former times; it is already impossible to imagine reality as the structure which alone has a basis. The modern pluralistic world cannot be interpreted in a single rationalistic way as the only possible way, which would lead to the world’s being be united on a single principle for the sake of final truth. The philosophical world of the twentieth century “shivers” because of the fluctuation its own foundation, which was recently the symbol of its firmness and absoluteness. The article offers an analysis of a foundation of this kind, viz. evidence. The tradition of this concept leads us to Descartes and back to the three main versions of transcendentalism: Kant’s, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s. The author finally comes to the conclusion that the appearance of overcoming the metaphysical approach in the twentieth century is replaced by a transcendental and dialectical “game” around metaphysical concepts.

Preface: Unrealized Potentials, Anomalous Experiences, and Humanistic Psychology

For half a century, mainstream psychology had been proposing that human experiences, such as ecstasy and anguish, are effects of neurophysiological processes. The major topics of psychology classes were neuron networks, genetic effects, the behavior of rodents, and statistical tables. Early humanistic psychologists asked, “Where is the experience in all of this? Where is the human in all of this? What does it all mean? And what will be the impact on my life?” Mainstream psychology had developed useful tools to describe, measure, and explain human conduct, with explanations ranging from Freudian psychodynamics to Skinnerian operant conditioning. But exploration of the existential issues of human life, of meaning and intention, were sidelined. It took a “humanistic revolution” to deepen and broaden the scope of psychology to include humanistic psychology (and existential psychology in Europe).

Humanism Under Siege: The Janus Face of the Modern Revolution of Dignity

The article interprets the crisis of liberal democracy in the 21st century as the result of an ongoing, dual revolution of dignity. One such revolution is the work of “humanist outliers”: small groups and individuals dedicated to compassionate social emancipation. Thus anti-authoritarian revolutions like that of Solidarity in Poland (1980–81) succeed in large part thanks to cultural and political innovations springing from the work of such small groups. However, the humanist revolution of dignity – featuring altruism and cooperation – has its “tribal doppelgänger”: a twin revolution that strives to reclaim national dignity and pride at the price of submission to authoritarian rule.

Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua

Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua

Humanistic and Positive Psychologies: The Continuing Narrative After Two Decades

Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi launched the “positive” psychology movement with a conspicuously negative strategy: the seemingly deliberate character assassination of humanistic psychology. Their critical remarks, not at all original, appeared designed to distance positive psychology from humanistic psychology and (ironically) to paint a portrait of positive psychology as being more original than it really was. Seligman has since apologized for disparaging humanistic psychology, and this article assesses both the content of that apology and its value in the ongoing discussion concerning the relationship between humanistic and positive psychologies. The apology was found to be superficial and laced with more extensive explicit and implicit negative assessments of humanistic psychology. These assessments were found to range from theoretically biased partial truths to completely unfounded claims, all unworthy of scientific discourse and in need of fact checking. The unabated dissemination of these arguably damning and unsubstantiated views is framed in terms of van Kaam’s observations concerning the collectivist leanings of postindustrial psychological science, which fly in the face of the humanistic revolution.

The Humanistic Revolution in Psychology: Its Inaugural Vision

This article presents a textual analysis of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. The analysis culminated in the creation of a composite narrative that expresses the character of the humanistic vision for psychological science, a historical snapshot of the evolving humanistic revolution circa 1961. The analysis showed humanistic psychology to have proposed a nonreactionary, inclusive, integrative approach to psychology. This approach was anchored in a radicalized image of humanity, one that would not rely wholly on theories and methods of research designed for nonhuman beings. The findings further indicate that, from its inception, humanistic psychology was envisioned to be a unique amalgam of what would today be considered cultural psychology, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology, without being reducible to any one of these subfields. It was and remains an effort in earnest to do justice to a truer self, engaged in the process of becoming, operating within biological and cultural parameters.

Reflexión en torno al Humanismo, pilar central del proyecto educativo Uniacc

Si bien la época contemporánea está marcada por la revolución tecnológica, donde Internet y las Redes Sociales son las que han cambiado drásticamente el escenario hasta espacio temporal donde coexistimos; es la revolución humanista la que generará en mayor medida el cambio de las estructuras mentales y sociales para lograr la sustentabilidad en el planeta. Quizá presenciemos una vuelta al Renacimiento, pero esta vez con el contenido de la vanguardia científico filosófica, encabezada por intelectuales como Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Jurgüen Habermas Noam Chomsky y la “Escuela Chilena” de Biología (Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela) y su aplicación a los criterios de convivencia y de creación humanas. Esta reflexión pretende ser un aporte al Proyecto Educativo de Uniacc, que coloca al Humanismo como pilar de su labor educativa.

The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Reviewed by: The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni Nick Mdika Tembo (bio) The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni Berghahn Books, 2016, 186 pp. ISBN 978-1785331183, $150 hardcover, $24.95 paperback. Using decolonial philosopher Nelson Maldonaldo-Torres's conception of the "third humanist revolution," and the fundamental principles of decolonial humanism and pluriversalism, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni's The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life proposes the "Mandela phenomenon" as an Afrocentric episteme that could help reposition Africa in the world. The author avers that since time immemorial blacks have been pushed by the consequences of imperial reason—imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neocolonialism and underdevelopment (xv)—to inhabit what Frantz Fanon calls the "zone of non-being." Imperial reasoning is a constitutive part of what Ramón Grosfoguel once described as the myth of modernity, a self-generated and insulated Eurocentric modernity, "which develops on its own without depending on any one else on earth" (89). Grosfoguel reinforces his argument by stating that imperial reasoning is solipsistic in nature: Without solipsism, there can be no myth of a subject with universal rationality that confirms itself as such. We see here the beginning of the ego-politics of knowledge [. . .], which is nothing less than a secularization of the Christian cosmology of the theo-politics of knowledge. In the ego-politics of knowledge, the subject of enunciation is erased, hidden, camouflaged by what Santiago Castro-Gómez has called zero-point philosophy. (89) Understood from a critical decolonial perspective, the myth of modernity is the nerve center of Cartesian logic, an ego-politics of knowledge in which the nonwhite/black seems to have, according to Ndlovu-Gatsheni, "endured the consequences of being a racialized and dehumanized subject as well as being written out of the human ocumene and being reduced to dispensability" (12). [End Page 426] From its emergence, decolonial humanism quickly registered on the radar of critical theorizations of Blackness, Africanness, and Black solidarities, and Ndlovu-Gatsheni's monograph is only the latest in a long list of Afrocentric "initiatives and ideological/intellectual/political creations [such] as Garveyism, Ethiopianism, Négritude, African Personality, Conscienscism, Pan-Africanism, African Socialism, and Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), right up to the revived African Renaissance, [that] were produced within the context and course of African decolonial humanist struggle" (13–14). This critical thinking is from the Global South in general and Africa in particular, led by thinkers whose societies have experienced what Enrique Dussel calls "the underside of modernity." Ndlovu-Gatsheni's narrative is in harmony with decolonial perspectives in several respects. Central in The Decolonial Mandela is what Catherine Walsh calls decoloniality's ability "to make visible, open up, and advance radically distinct perspectives and positionalities that displace Western rationality as the only framework and possibility of existence, analysis, and thought" (17). Ndlovu-Gatsheni advances radically distinct perspectives and positionalities through his proposition of an analytical standpoint and coordinates that can galvanize an African decolonial body of thought, called the "Mandela phenomenon," which, in essence, is a "new reading of Mandela's political life and legacy informed by a critical decolonial ethics of liberation" (xvi). In Ndlovu-Gatsheni's view, this critical decolonial ethics of liberation, privileges [the] paradigm of peace, humanism, and racial harmony as opposed to the imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war and racial hatred. At the core of critical decolonial ethics of liberation is the unmasking of an imperial/colonial/ apartheid system that was driven by the logic of racial profiling, and the classification and hierarchization of human beings. It resulted in the denial of the humanity of black people and enabled enslavement, conquest, colonization, dispossession, exploitation, and notions of impossibility of co-presence of human races. (xvi) Ndlovu-Gatsheni asserts that the "Mandela phenomenon" is "an authentically African invention and achievement that emerged and crystallised in the course of the anti-imperial, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid and anti-global coloniality struggles" (2; emphasis added). I revisit this assertion shortly. My point for now is to show that the author regards Mandela as an exceptional personality fit for scholarly discourse, and that therefore his book...

Introduction: On Sylvia Wynter and the Urgency of a New Humanist Revolution in the Twenty-First Century

Introduction: On Sylvia Wynter and the Urgency of a New Humanist Revolution in the Twenty-First Century

Neither/Nor: Dialogue in Juan de Lucena's Libro de vida beata

Neither/Nor: Dialogue in Juan de Lucena’s Libro de vida beata José Miguel Martínez Torrejón Critics tend to agree that Juan de Lucena belongs to a transitional period between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But, since literary periodization is very slippery terrain, it is not so easy to locate Lucena’s exact spot in that wide spectrum. Likewise it is difficult to define him in other respects: he was a Jewish convert dealing with Christian concepts, and a Castilian who spent several formative years in Italy, whence he addressed his fellow nationals about key philosophical issues from an Italian perspective. His major work, De vita felici, or Libro de vida beata is in dialogue form, a genre that enjoys ambivalent literary status, between the philosophic and the literary, between mimesis and diegesis. Many transitional qualities make this work a privileged text for the study of the cultural moment in which it was produced. 1 Dated in Rome in 1463, Vida beata examines the theological question of whether happiness can be attained in this world. The topic had been the subject of a heated polemic in Naples, nearly two decades before, which began when Lorenzo Valla proposed his solution, namely, that it is natural for men, since they are limited to [End Page 211] sensorial perception, to seek earthly goals and take pleasure in their accomplishments, which leads to worldly happiness. These views, expressed in several versions of his dialogue De voluptate (1431), led to Valla’s prosecution by the Inquisition in 1444 because his text was widely misunderstood as a defense of face-value Epicureanism. 2 It was only after the trial, in 1446, that Bartolomeo Facio, the new official historian of the Neapolitan court, became Valla’s main opponent. After an exchange of invectivae and recriminationes, Facio wrote his own dialogue, De felicitate vitae (1448), in which he contended that true happiness could not be attained in this world and it was therefore better to wait until the next. Facio’s work can thus be considered a belated overreaction to a misinterpretation of Valla’s treatise. 3 It is not insignificant that it was Facio’s dialogue that Lucena chose to imitate, and it has been pointed out how, all too eager to introduce an Italian topic into the Spanish cultural scene, he failed to articulate his novelty with previous treatments of the same topic in Castile, although he succeeded in incorporating references to the Spanish social reality, such as the praise of Jewish ancestry and the defense of converts. 4 With regard to form, Lucena’s text being so clearly a version of Facio’s, it is a common critical attitude to disregard seemingly minor differences and assume that the two works are closer than they actually are. The differences, however, might prove to be more meaningful than the similarities, and a close reading of the different aspects of this adaptation will allow us to better evaluate Vida beata as the revealing cultural document it is. [End Page 212] Lucena seems to be self-conscious of his role as one the front-runners of a cultural shift of major proportions. As a member of the intellectually active court of Bishop Alonso de Cartagena, he had likely developed early in his life a curiosity for anything new, which was further stimulated when his protector sent him to Italy to enter the service of the humanist Pope, Pius II (1458). It is from this privileged position that he became acquainted with the humanistic revolution and learned that it operated mainly through words and over the realm of the word. This accounts for his theoretical defense of literary studies in the Epístola exhortatoria a las letras, a mature work, written some twenty years later. 5 He also seems to have been aware of recent trends in philosophical discourse as demonstrated by his choice of Ciceronian dialogue for his most ambitious work, which, as we will see in the context of Castilian letters, amounts to a true statement of purpose. Indeed, Lucena’s immediate predecessor, Facio, had written in the manner of Leonardo Bruni and Coluccio Salutati, who had tried to substitute the Ciceronian notion of disputatio...

Caring Incidents

The quality of health care in the United States has become a topic of national debate in the 1990s. Efforts are under way to eliminate inequities by providing educational strategies to monitor the administration of health care activities. In this article the author links the current proposals in the administration of health care to organizational strategies and to the humanistic approach to caregiving in nursing. Specific examples demonstrate how first-year nursing students are encouraged to integrate structured caring incidents into their clinical experiences. The article relies on the philosophical base provided by nurse theorist, Joyce Travelbee. She expressed concern that nursing care in institutions lacked compassion and needed a "humanistic revolution with a focus on caring" (Travelbee, 1991, p. 2).

Medicine Man: A Young Doctor on the Brink of the 21st Century

Few physicians may be examining the moral consequences of the changes being brought about in medicine by the growth of technology. These changes will affect not only physicians but everyone who comes in contact with them. This book will function as a sextant by means of which we can check our present position and examine those consequences. The points of reference are a narrative of the life of a third-year medical student, Aaron Kenigsberg (the present), including family vignettes used to highlight his physician father (the past), and two essays that examine the humanist revolution in medicine (the future). Those, in brief, are the premise and content of this book, which is at various times, but not consistently, witty, interesting, repetitious, disconcerting, and, probably, more likely to appeal to the lay public than to physicians. Many of the important yet timeworn ethical issues in medicine are raised, although without further

Architecture, Aesthetics and Pluralism: Theories of Taste as a Determinant of Architectural Standards

The description of America as a melting pot society has proven over the past twenty years to be quite inaccurate. While the slow and often arduous trek from Ellis Island to suburbia diluted specific ethnic characteristics and customs, it did not erase them. America has remained a pluralistic society and, in fact, has become more so with the increase in ethnic pride and the interest in family background symbolized by the popularity of Alex Haley's Roots. Any aspirant to a major political office will testify to the breadth of the constituency which must be appealed to in order to successfully campaign for election. To the satisfaction of big business, market analysts can demonstrate that products designed for specific markets can be far more profitable than assuming that society is a grey and undifferentiated mass. A corollary can be found in the arts and architecture where one finds a wide variety in form, style, and artistic intention. In architecture, for instance, the Modern Movement, which once held the promise of an industrial and humanistic revolution concretized in built form, has, upon retrospect, emerged as only the more successful from among a number of movements, all of which occurred during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The clear vision of the prophets of modernism, LeCorbusier, Gropius, and Mies Van der Rohe, can now barely be seen over the visual clutter of the urban landscape where new fashions in architecture have changed nearly as rapidly as those in clothing. In the end, the Modern Movement in architecture, like so many other movements throughout history, left only a few monuments.

Architecture, Aesthetics, and Pluralism: Theories of Taste as a Determinant of Architectural Standards

The description of America as a melting pot society has proven over the past twenty years to be quite inaccurate. While the slow and often arduous trek from Ellis Island to suburbia diluted specific ethnic characteristics and customs, it did not erase them. America has remained a pluralistic society and, in fact, has become more so with the increase in ethnic pride and the interest in family background symbolized by the popularity of Alex Haley's Roots. Any aspirant to a major political office will testify to the breadth of the constituency which must be appealed to in order to successfully campaign for election. To the satisfaction of big business, market analysts can demonstrate that products designed for specific markets can be far more profitable than assuming that society is a grey and undifferentiated mass. A corollary can be found in the arts and architecture where one finds a wide variety in form, style, and artistic intention. In architecture, for instance, the Modern Movement, which once held the promise of an industrial and humanistic revolution concretized in built form, has, upon retrospect, emerged as only the more successful from among a number of movements, all of which occurred during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The clear vision of the prophets of modernism, LeCorbusier, Gropius, and Mies Van der Rohe, can now barely be seen over the visual clutter of the urban landscape where new fashions in architecture have changed nearly as rapidly as those in clothing. In the end, the Modern Movement in architecture, like so many other movements throughout history, left only a few monuments.

Assessment and acceptability of urban futures

Political economy was invented to interpret and regulate the new economic techniques necessary for bringing about the industrial revolution and preserving the wealth of the nation. As an urban society, we now need to invent a social economy as a basis for bringing about a humanistic revolution and restoring the quality of urban living. In this article Mr Gappert argues that, for the formulation of sound urban policies, more attention needs to be given to participation, diversity, investment of social resources in support of parallel alternative systems, and less to indicators, predictability and social control.