Humanity

Studies of European views of man and of the dignity of man have been central to the history of ideas, and books continue to be published discussing Western or European views of man. Meanwhile, women, lower-class men, and people of color have delved into the scholarship to determine if a thinker's text intended man (homme in French) to be generic as in the Hebrew adam, Greek anthropos, or Latin homo sapiens; or whether the intention or application was narrowed by sex, rank, class, nationality, or ethnic/racial construct. Of course the androcentric man does emphasize the male in implying humanity. Feminist scholarship, with precedents in medieval and early modern women authors, has sought out instances wherein man androcentrically included woman and the dignity of man the dignity of man and woman. Likewise, with precedents in the sixteenth-century debates between Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566) and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1572 or 1573) on the humanity of indigenous peoples of the Americas, as well as in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century movements against the trade and enslavement of Africans, scholars have explored the documents that did expand inclusively the "natural rights of man." Humanity as a term for the human species has begun to be utilized to replace man in discussion of texts that meant by man all humans. The history of the idea of humanity (or philosophical anthropology as Charles Trinkaus labeled it in his "In Our Image and Likeness": Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 1970) is then a sequel to previous scholarship on the history of the idea of generic man, anthropos.