Quotes from Rebecca Goldstein

And the freest of all is the philosopher who thinks so little of the ceaseless flow of time as to step out of it. This is why the philosopher often appears ridiculous in the practical affairs of life, because he or she has stepped out of the rush of time.

You valorize intelligence because that's your most valued personal characteristic, just like the model feels about her beauty and the football player about his talent for using his body weight to mow down other human bodies.

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.

The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

Now who knows whether Socrates actually undertook what sounds like a pretty lame attempt at becoming a poet in the last month of his life? I'm the mother of a professional poet, and I know what goes into the making of such a creature. You might as well try to become a mathematician or a cosmologist in the last thirty days of your life.

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools, Plato said, which I thought was a very astute observation, especially considering how little it turned out that he actually knew about Google or really anything about the Internet. I

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die. (Oddly, philosophy departments have forgone turning this into an enrollment-boosting slogan.)

epimeleia heautou

That is Plato's great hope: that love of beauty can, when rightly cultivated and educated, battle immorality.

The psychoanalyst picks our dreams as if they were our pockets." "The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both – that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy. In the case of arate, the direction of the because can seem a little vaguer, so that it can sometimes seem almost as if someone is regarded as worthy because they are recognized.

Jewish Warsaw, which was roughly a third of Warsaw proper, was a city of rabbis and swindlers, capitalists and poets; but, most of all, it was a city of talkers. There were so many ideas in the air you could get an education simply by breathing deeply. (p. 206)

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.

Of the twenty-six dialogues of Plato, the internal dramas of seven of them are set during the spring and summer of 399: Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Sophist, Statesman, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.

Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can "infinitize" us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the "small group of people.

Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.

In fact, it's the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.

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.

The melding of experimental techniques with mathematical description was the great leap forward, accomplished in the seventeenth century, that brought us to the point at which, as Krauss put it, " Ã¢â'¬Ëœnatural philosophy' became physics.

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch. You ought to have sent up a balloon now and then to get a read on the prevailing cognitive conditions, the Thinks watching out for the Think-Nots. Now you've gone and let the stockpiling of fallacies reach dangerous levels, and the massed weapons of illogic are threatening the survivability of the globe.

I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.

His relevance derives overwhelmingly from the questions he asked and from his insistence that they cannot be easily dispensed with in the ways that people often think. One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions.

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.