Sublime

hole. As she read more about Buddhist philosophy, she noticed a similarity in its ideas to David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, and she began to wonder if there were Eastern roots in the Western Enlightenment. So began her quest to link Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit missionary to Tibet who wrote about Buddhism in 1728, with David Hume, who complete

The biosphere is utterly saturated with design, with purpose, with reasons. What I call the “design stance” predicts and explains features throughout the living world using the same assumptions that work so well when reverse-engineering artifacts made by (somewhat) intelligent human designers.