Humility and the transcendent

Abstract

Over the past decade, several authors have attempted to define humility as a "secular" virtue that avoids any reliance on "religious" or transcendent metaphysical frameworks. In this article I argue that these attempts to define humility in cognitive and self-evaluative terms are largely misconceived. I use the work of Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil to argue that humility cannot be accounted for on exclusively naturalistic assumptions and to suggest ways in which transcendence might be reintroduced into the discussion of humility without immediately adopting the "religious" framework that contemporary work in humility is so critical of. © 2001, The Society of Christian Philosophers.