Sarah Bakewell, Antonia Beamish (Read by)

Humanly Possible

The great humanist experiment in living

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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

The bestselling, prizewinning author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café brings us a celebration of 700 years of human endeavour and achievement, in which dozens of philosophers, scientists, classicists, architects, educationalists and others explore the art of being human

Humanly Possible is a wide-ranging, personal, thought-provoking and entertaining journey through the battle of ideas over some 700 years of history - mostly, but not exclusively, in Europe. Through a mixture of biography and philosophy, Bakewell seeks to understand what humanism is, why it has continued to flourish despite opposition from fanatics, mystics, tyrants and cultural pessimists of all kinds, and exactly why we should value and defend it in the 21st century.

© Sarah Bakewell 2023 (P) Penguin Audio 2023

Reviews

In this exhilarating handbook Sarah Bakewell explains that a humanist philosopher is one who puts the whole living person at the centre of things . . . Bakewell finishes this bracing book by urging us to draw inspiration from these earlier men and women as we try hard to live bravely and humanly in what sometimes seems like an aridly abstract and loveless world
Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times

About the author

Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the "hippie trail" through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex, and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London, before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include How to Live: a life of Montaigne, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Prize, and At the Existentialist Café, a New York Times Ten Best Books of 2016. She was also among the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. She still has a tendency to wander, but is mostly to be found either in London or in Italy with her wife and their family of dogs and chickens.
www.sarahbakewell.com

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