The Secular Humanist Pantheon

October 1996

From the August 1996 issue of the Humanist Monthly, newsletter of the Capital District Humanist Society.

The following are among people from the past who have contributed enormously to the development and history of secular humanism as a philosophical world view based on rational thought and human self-reliance. [See our Historical Humanists index for more information on some of the people listed below, as well as others.]

Confuscius--c. 551-479 BCE Chinese philosopher	Marie Curie--1867-1934 French physical chemist
Socrates--c. 470-399 BCE Greek philosopher	George Sand--1804-1876 French novelist
Epicurus--341-270 BCE Greek philosopher	Charles Darwin--1809-1882 English naturalist and evolutionist
Hypatia--c. 370-415 BCE Greek philosopher	George Eliot--1819-1880 English novelist
Aristotle--384-322 BCE Greek philosopher	Robert Green Ingersoll--1833-1899 American lawyer and orator
Lucretius--c. 100-53 BCE Roman poet.	Friedrich Nietzsche--1844-1900 German philosopher and poet.
Marcus Aurelius--121-180 Roman emperor	George Bernard Shaw--1858-1950 British playwright and critic
Glordano Bruno--1548-1600 Italian philosopher.	John Dewey1859-1952 American philosopher, psychologist, writer
Galileo--1564-1642 Italian mathematician, astronomer, physicist	George Santayana--1883-1952 Spanish-American poet and philosopher
Spinoza--1632-1677 German philosopher	Bertrand Russell--1872-1970 English mathematician and philosopher.
Voltaire--1694-1778 French writer and satirist	Albert Einstein--1879-1955 American physicist
David Hume--1711-1776 Scottish philosopher and historian	Margaret Louise Sanger--1879-1966 American founder of birth control movement
Thomas Paine--1737-1809 American political philosopher	James Langston Hughes--1902-1967 American writer
Thomas Jefferson--1743-1826 Third President of the United States	Sidney Hook--1902-1989 American social and political philosopher
Mary Wollstoncraft--1759-1797 English author, advocate of women's rights	B.F. Skinner--1904-1990 American behavioral psychologist
Rammohan Ray--1772-1833 Indian religious and social reformer	Jean-Paul Sartre-1905-1980 French writer and philosopher
Auguste Comte--1798-1857 French philosopher	Joseph Fletcher--1905-1991 American biomedical and situational ethicist
Elizabeth Cady Stanton--1815-1902 American woman suffrage leader	Jacob Bronowski--1908-1974 American mathematician, humanist author
Mark Twain--1835-1910 American writer	Albert Camus--1913-1960 French novelist, essayist and playwright
Thomas Alda Edison--1847-1931 American inventor	Andrei Sakharov--1921-1981 Russian muclear physicist and political dissident
Sigmund Freud--1856-1939 Austrian founder of psychoanalysis	Isaac Asimov--1920-1992 American biochemist and author