Sublime

Physics has long been guided by the Copernican principle, the idea that no scientific theory should grant special status to humans or assume that we and our minds are central to the cosmos. But few theories have managed to account convincingly for this exactitude or explain why the conditions of our world appear to be signaling precisely that.

The whole congregation would have understood when he said good manners were an excellent beginning, a kind of discipline that could lead to actual virtue, given time.

Écoutez, Monsieur, j'ai été pendant trois ans receveur d'autobus à Paris, sur le 91, et je vous le recommande aux heures de cohue. Ce qui fait que j'ai pu acquérir une connaissance de l'humanité qui se pose un peu là, et qui m'a naturellement poussé du côté des bêtes. J'espère que ça vous suffira, comme explication.

Here the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre perceives a shift from communal ethics to a world order in which the individual has apparently become the norm. In his magnum opus After Virtue, MacIntyre explodes, among other things, the myth of modern moral freedom. Yes, we have been liberated from priests and the morality they imposed on us; but,

But the most important “stimulus to the development of the social virtues” was the fact that people are passionately concerned with “the praise and blame of our fellow-men.”16 Darwin, writing in Victorian England, shared Glaucon’s view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are obsessed with their reputations. Darwin believed that the emotions that