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35941a9 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. technology Rebecca Goldstein
3e35e0e A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. Rebecca Goldstein
1d0e920 The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths -- even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision -- are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is.. Rebecca Goldstein
3eef32a We each carry our own designated end within us, our very own death ripening at its own rate inside of us. There are insignificant people who are harboring unawares the grandeur of large deaths. We carry it in us like a darkening fruit. It opens and spills out. That is death. Rebecca Goldstein
1334332 It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch. Rebecca Goldstein
a6d9c8c As Plato: 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. philosophy theology Rebecca Goldstein
a639a2a Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people. legalism rationalization Rebecca Goldstein
f57d904 We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah. Rebecca Goldstein
c09da91 Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed. manipulation parenting Rebecca Goldstein
8d6b22d Thinking is the soul speaking to itself. medication thinking Rebecca Goldstein
cddca6f I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy. intelligence Rebecca Goldstein
d513393 Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back. science Rebecca Goldstein
1c1ee03 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? meaning-of-life Rebecca Goldstein
ec5b9d2 If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why - unlike scientific progress - is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. perspective Rebecca Goldstein
286c3ea I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all. Rebecca Goldstein
2a141bd The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding. Rebecca Goldstein
44f13c6 This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student. education mentoring teaching Rebecca Goldstein
57c23f8 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. Rebecca Goldstein
3e5c4ec When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then... what? wonder precision Rebecca Goldstein
6f9d9ff 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." vocabulary perspective Rebecca Goldstein
f9c9f26 one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall--in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. "At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief." Rebecca Goldstein
85f3f41 Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to. Rebecca Goldstein
1afc44c Our failures in charity are chained to a narrowed vision of the world that makes too much of the differences between us, and this is our enslavement. this-year-we-are-slaves passover-seder Rebecca Goldstein
f6a0e65 As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable. predictability order Rebecca Goldstein
e788462 how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience--so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost--and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little diffe.. Rebecca Goldstein
bc9c46b W)hat is remarkable about the Greeks--even pre-philosophically--is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancien.. philosophy singularity Rebecca Goldstein
77230b2 It has been claimed that Plato was an egalitarian; it has been claimed that he was a totalitarian. It has been claimed that he was the utopian, proposing a universal blueprint for the ideal state; it has been claimed that he was an anti-utopian, demonstrating that all political idealism is folly. It has been claimed that he was a populist, concerned with the best interests of all citizens; it has been claimed he was an elitist with disturbi.. rationalizations Rebecca Goldstein
e4c5cb9 s death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists . . . A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does e.. Rebecca Goldstein
f9db69b Is death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists . . . A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does .. Rebecca Goldstein
c35994f leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The Rebecca Goldstein
31d5809 It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being. purity physics Rebecca Goldstein
34f0003 The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved's recklessness, for the sake of the sweetness that is there, and the shudder only makes more violent the shuddering that announces love (Phaedrus 251). I do not think, but for that sweetness, the friend of whom I spoke would have become impassioned as.. Rebecca Goldstein
79672b7 He hadn't altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her. Rebecca Goldstein
07bffbd Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better. This is why discussion around the table is so essential. This is why philosophy must be argumentative. It proceeds by way of arguments, and the arguments are argued over. Everything is aired in the bracing dialectic wind stirred by many clashing viewpoints. Only in this way ca.. discussion reasons arguments Rebecca Goldstein
cc78631 Einstein's and Godel's metaconvictions were addressed to the question of whether their respective fields are descriptions of an objective reality--existing independent of our thinking of it--or, rather, are subjective human projections, socially shared intellectual constructs. Rebecca Goldstein
0a6c984 No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness? sanity reality rationality Rebecca Goldstein
fe95583 The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifest in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image - a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals... Rebecca Goldstein
2430d97 In a field like philosophy, where understanding involves not so much the reception of knowledge but rather a transformation of the receiver itself, so that the receiver, which is to say the student, can generate the knowledge for him- or herself, then the physical presence of the teacher is essential. Rebecca Goldstein
c88a0ad 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 Rebecca Goldstein
203ffb1 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." Rebecca Goldstein
9be633c 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. openness Rebecca Goldstein
7bcb2e9 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? war protest weather Rebecca Goldstein
a196713 Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. 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. Rebecca Goldstein
91f65c8 So did he answer you? I finally had to ask her after a considerable pause, accompanied by the tapping of her fingernails. (illustration credit ill.3) Not really, she said. I'm not sure giving answers is in his bag of tricks. He seems to be more about messing with your mind so that you can't stop thinking about his questions. And if he thinks I can afford to keep stepping out of time like this, with my schedule, then, well, he's just way off.. Rebecca Goldstein
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