Putting the Hume in Humanism

A few days ago the magazine of my alma mater, Swarthmore College , arrived in the mail. In it, I noticed an article on one of the alumni most unrecognized by the college, Robert George . The article offered a surprisingly fair and accurate portrayal of George’s writings on new natural law. But there was one small problem: “Natural law’s antagonist is secular humanism, whose founder and namesake David Hume famously wrote . . . ” For the record, humanism comes from human , a word used frequently for the species homo sapiens . No offense to David Hume.