Quotes from Rebecca Goldstein

inside out, with all the Sturm und

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.

Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.

For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.

The old love of philosophy had returned. The process of thinking about philosophy always reminds me of fireworks. One question is shot up and bursts into a splendorous many. Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes these failed solutions are scientific, and sometimes they are religious, and sometimes they are based on what is called plain common sense.

Just as thinking is the soul speaking to itself (Theaetetus 189e), forcing itself to articulate its reasons and exposing those reasons to evaluation as if to different aspects of its own self, so we enlarge our thinking by bringing others into the dialogue.

One must exert oneself in order to achieve a life that matters. 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.

Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.

So comfortable would Plato feel seated at philosophy's seminar table that Alfred North Whitehead could famously write, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

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!

And I would add, by the way, that this projectification of the child has only increased with the liberation of women. Ambitious women, who have invested so much in their education and careers, are required to make sacrifices to their own advancement by the obstruction that is a child. And so these mothers will require of that child that it really be worth the sacrifice, worth the slowing down of their own scramble up the ladder of success.

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.

Mother' is not an identity one can just try on for size.

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.

It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.

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!"

Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.

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.

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?

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

I don't think I can write the story of my life, but I can write the story of my hair.

Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.