Sublime

ethics is about responding not to human beings in general but to human beings in particular—and in all their particularity.

The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.

The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world inside us and will enable us to engineer and manufacture life.

Second, Medicine 3.0 considers the patient as a unique individual.

Nuland was a renowned surgeon-philosopher whose seminal book about mortality, How We Die, had come out when I was in high school but made it into my hands only in medical school. Few books I had read so directly and wholly

“You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don’t know how people ought to live.”

Descriptions like Nuland’s convinced me that such things could be known only face-to-face.

From these observations they derived the fundamental axiom of their philosophy: a good human life, what the ancients called a eudaemonic life, is one that is lived by applying reason to the betterment of society.

Socrates was put to death because most people, rightfully prefer myth to critical thinking. Strauss understood that Athens and Jerusalem are two competing ideals, two mutually exclusive models, for organizing society. Athens espouses the ideal of negative capability, but Jerusalem espouses the ideal of obedience to the Divine Law.