Humanist Anthology

Book excerpt: When this important volume was first compiled in 1961, Margaret Knight brought together a full range of humanist thought to depict the Stoic and Epicurean traditions in the ancient world, the writers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, as well as significant thinkers in the 19th-and 20th-century rationalist traditions. Acclaimed writer and skeptic James Herrick has updated this impressive roster by adding novelists Mark Twain and E.M. Forester as well as scientists J. Bronowski, Richard Dawkins, and David Attenborough. Herrick also includes contributions by A.J. Ayer, Antony Flew, Sidney Hook, and Paul Kurtz. Incisive items from Shelley, Voltaire, T.S. Eliot, and T.H. Huxley, and many others are also provided. Among the subjects addressed are: morality without God, atheism and agnosticism, facing death, the nature of the physical world, ideas of human progress, and the criticism of claims of religion. Humanist Anthology provides ample ammunition for those engaged in arguments with religionists as well as sustenance for those who wish to reconsider their own attitudes about life.