Sublime

We cannot, then, replace Plato’s philosopher-kings with scientist-kings. First, we can’t just take at face value a group’s claim to scientific authority; we have to decide whom to accept as experts. Further, there will often be a non-trivial logical gap between established scientific results and specific policy decisions; and, even 2,400 years afte

He makes sense of our life and our commitments in a world that thinks what we are doing is naivete at best and folly at worst. He has turned our world upside down.

As Charles Taylor puts it, in modernity we remade the human person into a “buffered self,” protected and autonomous and independent, free to determine our own good and pursue our own “authentic” path.

Several years ago the students of Stanford voted him the best teacher on the faculty, which must have enraged his colleagues because you cannot maintain proper status in an American university without cultivated mediocrity. You must be academically “sound,” which is to be preposterously and phenomenally dull. Once I had a professor who was teaching

telling contrast here with ancient Greek sceptics, who instead cultivated detachment from the world. A ‘scientific philosophy’, Russell wrote in 1928, could fashion a ‘new morality’ that would ‘turn our earth into a paradise’.20 How this remarkable metamorphosis would come about he did not explain. He believed that reason did not move human beings

Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.

As Charles Taylor puts it, in modernity we remade the human person into a “buffered self,” protected and autonomous and independent, free to determine our own good and pursue our own “authentic” path.