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"I propose, in the following pages, to present a critique of contemporary social thought in the light of a scientific humanism--a humanism, i.e., which, steering clear of ethical attitudes that arise from purely personal predilections, does not pronounce a doctrine unsound unless it is either out of focus with the objectively observable human relations within which it functions, or unless these relations themselves violate our fundamental human passions. Current social criticism still selects its weapons from the armory of ethical idealization, metaphysical abstraction or biologic simplification. An Hegelian spirit, a Nietzschian stomach, or a Benthamite bible will not, however, in our critique, be permitted to determine the doom of an idea. Planting our critical standards within the solid soil of social relations, we shall allow these relations themselves to be the final touchstone of theory. Moreover, since our contemporary professoriat--those official assassins of social truth--are concealing their theoretical impotence behind the elusive mask of humanism, it will be our aim to demonstrate the essential inhumanity of their humanism, and having driven them from their moral moorings, challenge them to defend their doctrines on purely objective grounds. Social theory, broadly speaking, includes within its scope all those phenomena that derive from the realm of human society. Our critical excursions will therefore take us into such widely divergent fields as Anthropology and Ethics, Art and Economics, Law, Language, Sex, and War. These and a variety of other human themes we shall survey from our one theoretic standpoint, convinced that such a procedure alone can concentrate within our analytic searchlight the maximum of critical illumination. But criticism is not enough. Therefore, although we are fully aware that a new structure of positive social theory cannot well be reared unless upon a foundation of a new social world, we, nevertheless, believe that the broad outlines of such a theoretic structure can, in a number of instances, even now be briefly indicated and suggested. We therefore humbly offer what, so far as we know, is a new orientation in the psychology of instinct, a new approach to the problem of the soul, a new concept of culture, and a new philosophy of Art"--Foreword. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy argues for a reading of humanism and Enlightenment that strips them of their scientistic and Eurocentric implications and makes the values of both available for contemporary appropriation. Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon and mobilizing his conception of the relationship between human beings and technology against the conception implicit in Marx, he seeks to establish a ground for an encyclopedist humanism – a genetic encyclopedism – that lies beyond both the humanism combated by Heidegger and that philosopher's own anti-anthropological positions.

This paper articulates our desire for new humanisms in a contemporary cultural, economic and global context that has been described as posthuman. As researchers committed to modes of radical, critical, politicised and inclusive education, we are mindful of the significance of social theory and its relationship with articulations of social justice. Whilst sympathetic to the potentiality of posthuman thought we grapple with the imperative to embrace new humanisms that historicise and recognise global inequalities that concurrently exist in relation to a myriad of human categories including class, age, geopolitical location, gender, sexuality, race and disability. We focus in on the latter two categories and draw on ideas from postcolonial and critical disability studies. Our argument considers the problem of humanism (as a product of colonial Western imaginaries), the critical responses offered by posthuman thinking and then seeks to rearticulate forms of new humanism that are responsive to the posthuman condition and, crucially, the political interventions of Postcolonial and Critical Disability Scholars. We then outline six new humanist projects that could productively feed into the work of the Journal of Disability Studies in Education.

"New Humanism and Global Governance is the first in this subject to study how a variety of factors related to globalization will shape the future of the human community. It discusses the major challenges to today's world order and governance, as well as international experience in responding to these challenges. It covers a wide range of issues including unequal distribution of wealth, the widening income inequality gap, contradiction between economic development and environmental protection, the middle-income trap, de-globalization, democratic crisis, anti-immigration sentiments, nationalism, and radical extremism. It addresses these issues by emphasizing policy implications for governance. The chapters are selected papers from two international conferences jointly held by the Institute of Public Policy(IPP) at the South China University of Technology and UNESCO. Contributors from China, Europe and the US present their questions, observations, and analyses in a narrative and descriptive style which appeal to a wide range of audience."--Publisher's website

"Humanism" is a term that has designated a remarkably disparate set of ideologies. Nonetheless, strains of religious, secular, existential, and Marxist humanism have tended to circumscribe the category of the human with reference to the themes of reason, autonomy, judgment, and freedom. This essay examines the emergence of a new humanistic discourse in feminist theory, one that instead finds its provocation in the unwilled passivity and vulnerability of the human body, and in the vulnerability of the human body to suffering and violence. Grounded in a descriptive ontology that privileges figures such as exposure, dispossession, vulnerability, and "precariousness," this new humanism is a corporeal humanism. This essay probes both the promise and the limitations of this emergent humanism with particular reference to recent work by feminist philosophers Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero.

This volume shows that the vulnerability and mortality of life are the starting points of its transcendence which exceeds all representability. Only by renouncing fantasies of omnipotence of a theological, philosophical and scientific nature, human beings can advance to their destiny and introduce a New Humanism enabling a bond between all that is alive and between human beings and their transcendent dimension. This includes an understanding of time that no longer follows chronological-mechanistic constraints, a non-instrumental understanding of language that finds its dimension of depth in prayer and an understanding of God in which God is inseparably related to the openness of human existence. In traversing the arising avenues of thought, the four-part volume, written by three authors but to be read as a unity, is oriented towards a philosophy of central biblical passages, Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit, Musil's Man Without Qualities, Hölderlin's poetry and Lacan´s psychoanalysis.

In Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa Zimitri Erasmus questions the notion that one can know 'race' with one's eyes, or through racial categories and or genetic ancestry tests. She moves between the intimate probing of racial identities as we experience them individually, and analysis of the global historical forces that have created these identities and woven them into our thinking about what it means to be 'human'. Starting from her own family's journeys through regions of the world and ascribed racial identities, she develops her argument about how it is possible to recognise the pervasiveness of race thinking without submitting to its power. Drawing on the theoretical work of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter and others, Erasmus argues for a new way of 'coming to know otherwise', of seeing the boundaries between racial identities as thresholds to be crossed, through politically charged acts of imagination and love.

Front Matter -- Introduction -- Topics. The Specter of Religious Identity -- Humanizing Religion -- Conscience and Spiritual Conviction -- Metaphors of the Soul -- Voices of Neohumanism -- The Christ of Christian Humanism -- Thinkers. Human Only Human? -- Goodness and Fictive Persons -- Reverence for Life ₆ The Spirit of Life -- Sovereign Expressions of Life -- Ecstatic Humanism -- On Christian and Theological Humanism -- Index.