homo faber

English

Alternative forms

• Homo Faber

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin homō faber (“man the maker”, literally “ingenious man”).

Noun

homo faber (uncountable)

1. 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^[1], 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

• homo ludens

Italian

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from Latin homō faber.

Noun

homo faber m

1. homo faber