ABSTRACT
It has long been apparent, indeed notorious, that the word ‘humanism’ has come to be used in too many different ways-something which a computer-aided search of my own university’s library amply confirmed. Some initial attempt at precision may therefore not be out of place.1 In undertaking this one is certainly not supposing that one can isolate the true meaning of the word, still less that by doing so one can thereby reveal the essence of the entity being defined. The aim is much more modest: to produce a (provisional) definition that is historically useful-not so broad as to be vague or largely empty, but not so narrow as to focus on only one strand of a historical phenomenon which is more varied and complex. As a philosopher rather than a historian I shall not attempt one myself, but instead take over from Peter Burke what he has described as ‘a middle-of-the-road definition of humanism, neither too wide nor too narrow to be useful, as the movement to recover, interpret and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome’.2
