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Lee Trepanier

Lee Trepanier

Lee Trepanier

Even before the publication of Stephen Marche’s Atlantic piece, “The College Essay is Dead,” there had already been discussions about AI writing programs like ChatGPT in the academy. But the past few months have seen a flurry of activity with college administrators calling emergency meetings, professors changing their assignments, and educators writing essays (some perhaps written by AI?) that range in reaction …

For Camus, the great novelty of Christianity is not faith because faith only shields Christian beliefs from criticism but rather the Christian notion of apocalyptic history and a final redemption in the afterlife. This belief in the apocalypse expresses a tragic sensibility in which the Christian embraces his or her mortality in the hope of …

Kant’s conception of God was the author of divine commandments. Human obligation towards one’s fellow being started from these commandments, which Kant called “statutory commandments.” But the actual legislators of moral commandments were human beings themselves: God was the author of divine legislation, but moral legislation was self-created and self-directed by human conscience.

For humans, the path to unity with the prime mover was through nous: humans were to follow a single ethical direction with various adjustments made to remain on this path. Virtue was not obedience to abstract rules but following practical wisdom (phronesis) as led by the primer mover’s pull. Phronesis consequently was the motion between the primer mover and humans …