Sublime

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David Hume has extensively argued, our science is based on beliefs about the universe that can’t be proven or disproven.

Hume realised that it was good for society if people were nice to each other, so he thought that rational calculation, rather than moral instruction, lay behind social cohesion.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.

distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons,

According to the nineteenth-century British mathematician Augustus De Morgan, the story was passed around Paris that when Laplace presented his great book on celestial mechanics to Napoleon, the emperor (who enjoyed asking embarrassing questions) slyly mentioned that he’d been told the book made no mention of God. To which Laplace replied, “Je

This is not a description of the life of savages, but of an imagined community of virtuous anarchists, who need no police or law-courts because they always obey “reason,” which is the same as “natural law,” which, in turn, consists of those laws of conduct that are held to have a divine origin. (For example, “Thou shalt not kill” is part of natural

This contrasted25 with the more skeptical viewpoint of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who argued that since we could not be certain that the sun would rise again, a prediction that it would was inherently no more rational than one that it wouldn’t.26 The Bayesian viewpoint, instead, regards rationality as a probabilistic matter. In essence,

Rousseau explicitly identified modern civilization with corruption.