subsume səb-ˈsüm verb
1. contain or include inside something that is larger
2. consider (an instance of something) as part of a general rule or principle
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The word subsume has appeared in 19 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on June 8 in the Opinion essay “The Anti-College Is on the Rise” by Molly Worthen:
The point of bringing students to live, work and read together is nothing short of “the cultivation of wisdom, the living of a good life in thought and action, and selfless devotion to world and humanity,” according to the Arete Project’s website. But what philosophical foundations underlie those ambitions?
“I do wonder whether or not it’s mission-critical for an educational institution to have a fully articulated metaphysics and ethics and politics that underpin it — or to what extent that is inhibitive to the broader project of liberal education,” Ms. Marcus told me. “There is a deep-seated human desire to feel you’re a part of something bigger than yourself, and one of the problems of liberal modernity is that it doesn’t give you a whole lot beyond the self to subsume yourself in. That gives secular institutions like ours a little bit of a question mark about what that grounding vision is going to be.”
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