anthroposophy

Meaning

Noun

• Knowledge or understanding of human nature.
• A philosophy founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner (also capitalized as Anthroposophy), postulating the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development.

Origin

• From anthropo- + -sophy, from Renaissance Latin anthroposophia (attested in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, d. 1535, and Thomas Vaughan, d. 1666), popularized from the 1910s via German Anthroposophie (Rudolf Steiner, 1861–1925).