Sublime

Those debates are often staged in terms of a supposed opposition between individualism and collectivism, each appearing in a variety of doctrinal forms. On the one side there appear the self-defined protagonists of individual liberty, on the other the self-defined protagonists of planning and regulation, of the goods which are available through

Today you will hear many presumably learned people say that there is

no such thing as human nature, or that human beings do not have a nature. Now, there is a long historical development back of this view, which we cannot deal with here, and it is not entirely without an important point. But that point is mismade in the statement that human beings

History by now in our culture means academic history, and academic history is less than two centuries old. Suppose it were the case that the catastrophe of which my hypothesis speaks had occurred before, or largely before, the founding of academic history, so that the moral and other evaluative presuppositions of academic history derived from the

the indeterminacy of it all appeals to me.

I wrestle with and write about theology because I care about it to the depths of my being, because questions about who and what God is, and about what it means to be a Jew and a human being in the twenty-first century matter to me like almost nothing else does.

Nick Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?,” The Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–255, doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00309. 87. Nick Bostrom, “The Simulation Argument,” n.d., http://www.simulation-argument.com/.

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.