John Dewey — the name that carried the document.
He signed A Humanist Manifesto in 1933; Roy Wood Sellars and Raymond Bragg drafted it. Humanism has no founder and does not pretend otherwise.
Dewey is on this page because his is the name that made A Humanist Manifesto travel, and because the way it travelled is instructive. He was one of thirty-four signatories; the drafting was done by Roy Wood Sellars, a philosopher at Michigan, and Raymond Bragg, a Unitarian minister. The document was published in The New Humanist in 1933 and is unembarrassed about calling humanism a religion, proposing religious humanism as the successor to theistic religion rather than its opponent. Dewey's own A Common Faith, published the following year, argues along the same line — that the religious quality of experience can be detached from supernatural belief. Humanism has no founder and no venerated figures, and putting Dewey in the figures room as a teacher rather than anything grander is the accurate reading of how humanists themselves treat him.
The same ground, other faiths
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