Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was one of the greatest figures in the American Enlightenment and the struggle for American independence.

He was born in Boston and was apprenticed to the printing trade — where he educated himself. He set up his own printing trade after a brief spell in Britain. He bought and ran the Philadelphia Gazette. He founded the Philadelphia library and in 1744 set up the American Philosophical Society.

He was an inventor and philosopher. He proved that lightning was electrical by a famous experiment with a key tied to a kite. He invented bi-focals and the water-harmonica.He was interested in education and civil liberties.

Between 1764 and 1775 he was representative of the American colonies in London. While there he encouraged Thomas Paine to visit America, an action which was to have lasting influence. Frankllin was, like Paine, a participator in the American revolution and played his part in writing the American Constitution.

Franklin was brought up as a Presbyterian, but became a deist. He respected religion but thought it had been corrupted. He wrote:

I believe in one God, the creator of the universe; that he governs it by his Providence; that he ought to be worshipped; that the most acceptable service we can render to him is doing good to his other children; that the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.

He later became more sceptical of religion and firmly believed in the separation of church and state. Such views were typical of thoughtful and educated people in the eighteenth century.

Today, Benjamin Franklin House, London where where he lived between 1757 and 1775, is open to the public as a museum.

See Also…

• Wikipedia biography of Franklin

William Morris

William Morris was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist.

Morris was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he developed an interest in art and the Middle Ages and became friends with artists such as Burne-Jones. He read a great deal of theology and ecclesiastical history. He was involved in the formation of a ‘Brotherhood’ for the creation of religious art. Influenced by Rossetti he painted and concerned himself with production of beautiful books and house decoration.

Morris wrote long poems which indicated his move away from religion. The title of a long poem The Earthly Paradise shows a preference for a secular heaven. His lines ‘Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell ‘ from A Dream of John Bull suggest that the bond of friendship was human and of this life. ‘Fellowship’ also indicates his move towards the comradeship of socialism.

In the 1880s he took an active interest in socialism, which he considered meant the creation of an ideal society. His Utopian novel News From Nowhere depicts such a society. By this time he was quite critical of religion and is said to have attacked Christianity with zest. Yet he always took a greater interest in socialism than in freethought. However in the latter part of his life he devoted himself almost entirely to artistic and literary work.

A famous quotation comes from Hopes and Fears for Art : ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’ A very secular ideal.

William Morris gave a famous address ‘Art and Socialism’ at Leicester’s Secular Hall on 23 January 1884. He also met Ernest Gimson there who later became a follower of his ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, and a craftsman in his own right.

Legacy

A number of galleries and museums house important collections of Morris’s work including

• the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London
• the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton
• Morris’s homes Red House, Bexleyheath and Kelmscott Manor, London

Also see…

• The William Morris Internet Archive
• The William Morris Society
• Wikipedia biography on Morris
• Portraits of Morris at the National Portrait Gallery

Epicurus

Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher. He is often cited as a precursor of modern Humanism, but very little of his teachings have survived except in the recollections of his later followers, in particular in De Rerum Natura by the Roman poet Lucretius.

This epitaph, based on his philosophy, can still be seen on many ancient gravestones of the Roman Empire, and is often used at humanist funerals:

I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind.

Epicurus acquired a garden in Athens, where he lived in a community of friends, practising a way of life based on the teachings of Democritus. Unusually for his time, he welcomed slaves and women into his group, which lived as a family of equals.

Their outlook was that human life had come about by natural processes and that people should therefore live according to nature; this would be easy if people were content with what was enough.

They did not think that the world was designed by a supernatural power or had a purpose imposed on it by a deity. Although his views have been criticised, often by religious believers, for their emphasis on happiness as the purpose of life, or “hedonism”, Epicurus and his followers were not self- indulgent or selfish.

They promoted detachment and serenity, suggesting that a simple and temperate life would avoid pain, and realised that true happiness depended on moderation and the respect and friendship of others. These views are widely shared by modern humanists.

The British Museum contains a bust of Epicurus.

See also…

• Epicurus’s texts
• British Humanist Association article on Epicurus
• Wikipedia article on Epicurus
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Epicurus

Bernard Williams

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was an English moral philosopher, described by The Times as the “most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time”.

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Olaf Stapleton. Copyright © The University of Adelaide

William Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction.

Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Wallasey and educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA in Modern History in 1909 and a MA in 1913.

During World War I he served as a conscientious objector with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919.

Stapledon was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and used his thesis as the basis for his first published prose book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929).

Fiction and activism

However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his ideas to a wider public. The relative success of Last and First Men (1930) prompted him to become a full-time writer. He wrote a sequel and followed it up with many more books of both fiction and philosophy.

After 1945 Stapledon travelled widely on lecture tours, visiting the Netherlands, Sweden and France, and in 1948 he spoke at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroc?aw, Poland.

He attended the Conference for World Peace held in New York in 1949, the only Briton to be granted a visa to do so. In 1950 he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement.

Stapledon’s writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis and John Maynard Smith and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction.

Ideas

Stapledon was an agnostic who was hostile to religious institutions, but not to religious yearnings.

He wrote many non-fiction books on political and ethical subjects, in which he advocated the growth of “spiritual values”, which he defined as those values expressive of a yearning for greater awareness of the self in a larger context (“personality-in-community”).

A sudden death

After a week of lectures in Paris, he cancelled a projected trip to Yugoslavia and returned to his home in Caldy, where he died very suddenly of a heart attack.

Stapledon was cremated at Landican Crematorium, and then his widow and their children scattered his ashes on the sandy cliffs overlooking the Dee Estuary, a favourite spot of his that features in more than one of his books.

The University of Liverpool now houses the Olaf Stapledon archive.

Also see…

• On line archive
• Liverpool University, Olaf Stapleton collection
• Wikipedia article on Stapleton

George E Moore was a distinguished and influential English philosopher.

A friend of Bertrand Russell, influenced a whole generation of Cambridge graduates, including E.M. Forster and members of the Bloomsbury group.

In Principia Ethica, he explored the idea that goodness is a quality one can experience intuitively, and a fundamental concept that cannot be defined in terms of anything else. So he would not have agreed with Utilitarian philosophers who defined goodness in terms of maximising happiness and minimising pain. Nor with the religions which defined it in terms of duty to God.

Moore thought that friendship and aesthetic enjoyment were the best examples of goodness, an idea that many non-religious people would agree with.

Moore described himself as an “infidel”, thinking that there was no evidence for God’s existence (but also that there was no evidence for his non-existence), and was a president of the Ethical Union (the predecessor of the British Humanist Association) in its early days.

See also…

• Wikipedia article on Moore

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German political philosopher who wrote about economics and politics. His ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism.

Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he believed socialism would, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism.

Marx and religion

Karl Marx thought that religion was an illusion, with no real God or supernatural reality standing in the background. Religion was a force that stopped human societies from changing.

Marx believed that religion was a social institution, and reflected and sustained the particular society in which it flourished.

He went further. Religion was a tool used by the capitalists to keep the working-class under control.

Religion provided the working-class with comfort in their miserable oppressed circumstances, and by focussing attention on the joys to come after death, it distracted the workers from trying to make this life better.

Furthermore, it took the noblest human ideals and gave them to a non-existent God, thus cheating human beings of realising their own greatness and potential.

Marx argued that the illusory happiness provided by religion should be eliminated by putting right the economic conditions that caused people to need this illusion to make their lives bearable.

Religion was like a pain-killer (hence Marx’s famous reference to it as “the opium of the people”), but what was needed was to cure the sickness, not sedate the patient.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Marx lived for a long time in London. He died there in 1883. After he died, his friend Engels finished many of his works. Marx is buried at Highgate Cemetery, London.

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Adam Smith

Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economics.

He was one of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and was part of a brilliant intellectual circle that included David Hume, John Home, Lord Hailes and William Robertson.

In 1764, Smith left Glasgow to travel in Europe where met a number of leading European intellectuals including Voltaire, Rousseau and Quesnay.

Religious views

There has been considerable scholarly debate about the nature of Smith’s religious views. Smith’s father had a strong interest in Christianity and belonged to the moderate wing of the Church of Scotland.

Smith received the The Snell Exhibition – an annual scholarship awarded to a student of the University of Glasgow to allow them to undertake postgraduate study at Balliol College, Oxford. There he rejected Christianity and it is generally believed that he returned to Scotland as a deist.

Economist Ronald Coase has challenged the view that Smith was a deist, stating that while Smith may have referred to the “Great Architect of the Universe” in his works, other scholars have “very much exaggerated the extent to which Adam Smith was committed to a belief in a personal God.

He based this on analysis of a remark in The Wealth of Nations where Smith writes that the curiosity of mankind about the “great phenomena of nature” such as “the generation, the life, growth and dissolution of plants and animals” has led men to “enquire into their causes”.

Coase also notes Smith’s observation that “[s]uperstition first attempted to satisfy this curiosity, by referring all those wonderful appearances to the immediate agency of the gods.”

Smith is memorialised by a statue on the rear of Burlington House, London. He is also featured on the British £20 note.

Also see…

The content above has been taken from:

• BBC article on Smith
• BBC’s In Our Time: The Enlightenment in Scotland
• Wikipedia article on Smith

A.J. Ayer. Detail of illustration by Anthony Hare

Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, better known as A. J. Ayer was a British philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism. He was also President of the British Humanist Association (BHA) from 1965-70.

Ayer wrote in his Language, Truth and Logic that all religious and metaphysical statements were either nonsense or false.

He was active in the secularist and humanist movements, and edited The Humanist Outlook in 1968 in which distinguished members of the BHA Advisory Council, including himself, wrote about what Humanism meant to them. Ayer wrote:

In common with other humanists, I believe that the only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs.

He also wrote a description of humanist beliefs that is still used by the BHA:

Humanists think: that this world is all we have, and can provide all we need; that we should try to live full and happy lives ourselves and, as part of this, help to make it easier for other people to do the same; that all situations and people deserve to be judged on their merits by standards of reason and humanity; and, that individuality and social co-operation are equally important.

Ayer was an active speaker and campaigner on social and moral issues, such as voluntary euthanasia, and was a founder member and first President of the Agnostics’ Adoption Society in 1965.

In his 1988 Conway Memorial Lecture, The Meaning of Life, he commented on the lack of logical connection between religion and morality, and on the meaning of life for an atheist.

See also…

• Wikipedia article on Ayer

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and feminist.

Wollstonecraft was a remarkable woman. In her thinking she was ahead of her time to an extraordinary degree. She lived in the eighteenth century when women’s lives were very restricted, but wrote in favour of women’s rights.

She spoke in favour of boys and girls being taught together in the same schools, or co-education as we now call it. She also believed in informal conversational methods of teaching, and lots of physical exercise. This was a hundred years before free, universal education was brought in, and long before informal child-centred approaches in teaching.

The structure of society, based on privilege and inherited property, favoured men. Women had virtually no rights and were not allowed to vote. They were rarely given an opportunity to use their intellects in professional, managerial, artistic or academic roles.

Wollstonecraft believed that society was wasting its assets because it kept women in the role of ‘convenient domestic slaves’, and denied them economic independence. She demanded that women should be trained for professions and careers – in medicine (not just nursing), midwifery, business, farming, shop-keeping.

She said that this would free married women from ‘the bitter bread of dependence’ and would enable mothers and widows to live and manage their own affairs more rationally. “I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves,” she said, and maintained that “It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in this world.”

Her most famous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was published in 1792. It is now honoured as the first serious book to put forward feminist arguments.

She married William Godwin, an atheist and free-thinker who shared her outlook on life and society. He too was a writer and scholar. Her daughter Mary became the second wife of the great poet Shelley, who was also a freethinking atheist, and wrote the novel Frankenstein. Sadly, Mary Wollstonecraft died at the comparatively young age of 38, following the birth of her second child.

The conservative press of the time attacked this brave, outspoken woman, though she has always been honoured by freethinkers and humanists. She was criticised for blasphemy, for her support of Thomas Paine, the remarkable Englishman who helped the Americans in their War of Independence and the French in their Revolution, and for having a child outside marriage.

Her life and attitudes reflected the more enlightened views of her age, and she had an optimistic belief in the possibility that society could be improved through self-advancement and self-education. She also felt strongly that we should think and live our lives independently, without relying on a supreme being. She spent her short life working for these ideals and especially to improve the rights of women.

See also…

• Wikipedia biography of Wollstonecraft
• Portraits of Wollstonecraft at the National Portrait Gallery