Rebecca Goldstein Quotes
What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.
We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.
Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
Having your husband at a party is like adding anchovies to a salad. I love anchovies, but you can't taste anything else.
It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.
To matter, to mind. ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?
Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.
How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?
Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.
What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.
If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.
The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.
That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
In order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it.
Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.
Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.
Because of the failure of religion to offer satisfying answers to an increasing number of people, it's time for philosophy to address forcefully these questions that everybody is wondering about.
Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.
Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.
It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and I wouldn't say so much it's informed my views, but it's informed my interest, so I think as a child I was often very baffled by knowledge claims.
If we look at our attitudes consistently and work out the logical implications we're on the road to moral progress, moral understanding.
We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live moral lives and for there to be morality in the first place.
We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world.
If you don't exert yourself, or if your exertions don't amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.
Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better."
What one tries to force into a child against its own nature will never come to good.
A child's natural form of behavior is play, and in our aim to educate, play should be honored and preserved for as long past childhood as can be.
The sum and substance of education is the right training that effectually leads the soul of the child at play on to the love of the calling in its adult life.
And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.
From the beginning philosophy sought for The order behind the disorder Thales sipped cheap wine And in this did divine: "Why it's nothing at all but pure water!"
Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.
I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.
I don't think I can write the story of my life, but I can write the story of my hair.
The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse.
Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.
Youth is not an essential, but rather an accidental property. Nobody is in essence young. One either ceases to be or ceases to be young.
In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.
Kleos is sometimes translated as "acoustic renown" the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. It's a bit like having a large Twitter following.
Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.
And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)
As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.