Humanism in Europe and the Middle East

The earliest philosophers of ancient Greece directed their attention almost exclusively toward the nature of the cosmos and of metaphysical being. During the course of the fifth century B.C.E., this orientation began to change. The reasons are myriad. Certainly, Greek expeditions (mainly for commercial purposes) throughout the Mediterranean region led to encounters with cultures and social systems that were organized differently than the Hellenic city-state (polis), and these encounters led philosophers to reflect on the ways in which human beings lived—their nomoi, meaning conventions or ways of life as well as laws. The rise of medical science, especially the school on the island of Cos that is associated with Hippocrates, highlighted the problems posed by a specifically human sort of nature (physis), separate and distinct from the sorts of substance that pertained to psyche (soul or mind).

The first group of thinkers to address conceptual problems of the human condition were the Sophists (from the Greek word for wise men), a term applied to a loose affiliation of teachers and writers who mingled in Athens during the second half of the fifth century B.C.E.. Although divided on most issues of philosophical import, and thus not strictly speaking a school of thought, the Sophists were united in directing their interest toward humanity, and in particular toward the moral, political, and epistemic questions arising from human life. Perhaps the most famous of these thinkers was Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490–c. 420 B.C.E.), whose name is associated with the principle that "man is the measure of all things." Although his doctrines must be pieced together from fragmentary sources, Protagoras seems to have embraced a polis-centered form of moral and political relativism and a subjectivist epistemology that endowed human beings with the capacity to fashion their own conditions of life and forms of fulfillment. It is perhaps not surprising that Protagoras was reputedly a counselor to the famous Athenian democratic leader Pericles.

Socrates (469–399 B.C.E.) also advanced important humanist themes. While distancing himself from the Sophists, whom he regarded as charlatans, Socrates asserted that virtue was a form of knowledge, and that knowledge was teachable if the correct method (namely the question-and-answer technique of Socratic dialectic) was employed. Even those who might be considered too benighted to know anything—such as a simple adolescent slave, for example—could be shown to possess knowledge of sophisticated abstract concepts. Hence, all human beings were for Socrates capable of knowing goodness and of acting in accordance with it, since this knowledge was imprinted on each and every human soul and could be recovered by means of self-reflection.

A further manifestation of humanistic ideals came from the Hellenistic philosophical school of Stoicism, which appeared in the fourth century B.C.E.. The Stoics upheld a cosmopolitan doctrine of universal human reason and rejected particularistic attachments to place and culture in preference to a generalized care for humanity. This doctrine became popular among Roman thinkers such as Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), who posited a general "bond" in human society, among persons who are connected through speech and reason, and from which arose the moral and material fruits of civilized human conduct. The aspirations toward humanitas and philanthropia crystallized in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods.