homo faber
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English
Alternative forms
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin homō faber (“man the maker”, literally “ingenious man”).
Noun
homo faber (uncountable)
- The human being viewed as a tool maker and user, or having evolutionarily reached the stage of tool use.
- 1958, Hannah Arendt, chapter 2, in The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, page 22:
- Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god—not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths.
- 1981, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, page 1:
- Man is not only homo sapiens or homo ludens, he is also homo faber, the maker and user of objects, his self to a large extent a reflection of things with which he interacts. Thus objects also make and use their makers and users.
- 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 89:
- The production of tools (as opposed to the mere opportunistic use of available sticks and stones) indicates that Homo Faber is already thinking in terms of sets and classes.
- 2000 April 13, Marina Warner, “A New Twist in the Long Tradition of the Grotesque”, in London Review of Books, volume 22, number 08, →ISSN:
- The sandpit, mud, lollipop sticks, goo, plasticine, oozing clay and, later, petri dishes and test tubes: playing with such stuff, Hall argues, has clearly influenced the materialisations of contemporary art, so much of it three-dimensional, inherently transient and labile, and playful. Homo ludens has supplanted homo faber.
Coordinate terms
Italian
Etymology
Unadapted borrowing from Latin homō faber.