“The decline of academic humanities does not necessarily mean the end of the humanities. It could mean this (and thus the withering of humanity), it could also mean a new way forward. Humans are marked—as Hannah Arendt identified—by natality, the truth of birth and new initiatives.”

“The site’s logo of a tower is an emblem of modernity haunted by genesis. But as both the myth of Babel and the image of the gene remind us, the origin is not at the beginning, but in the middle.”

“The project recognizes that the stories we tell ourselves about the passage to modernity are many and often conflicting even within one discipline.”