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191ce54
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Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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e4118fa
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The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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7cd39a2
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It was intolerable what lay hidden within another, intolerable tat you could not divide one person into another with no remainder.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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cd4b3d6
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In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions..
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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a98d2a9
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I)n order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. (p. 158)
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refute
conclusion
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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c78c273
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And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers21 that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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741f7dc
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There's no reason. Mazel, Maurice. Only mazel." (p. 343)" --
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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5ec9577
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2. The Ontological Argument Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God"). It is greater to exist than not to exist. If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2). To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3). It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4). God exists. This argument, first articulated by S..
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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90e818e
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epimeleia heautou,
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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8f6e917
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I feel an immediate closeness to anyone who loves New York or hates Los Angeles. Either condition is sufficient, but I've found that satisfaction of the one usually entails satisfaction of the other.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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e3cd69c
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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)
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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0a13bdf
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In fact, it's the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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2dbb7c8
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Vu iz do a vasser on a zamd? Vu is do a melech on a land? Dos vasser fun oyg iz on zamd. Der melech in kortn iz on land. Where is there water without sand? Where is there a king without land? Tears from the eyes are withoud sand.
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Rebecca Goldstein Mazel |
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a225051
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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.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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14ce7e3
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Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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7aedd13
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Hershel Blau, son of the Chasidic wandering preacher, was not yet so distant from his father's world that he didn't know deep in his soul the yearning to fly. What is a Chasid's dance but one long, sustained attempt to arch away into suspended ascension, beyond laws of bodies, a thing of air and light and fire? (p. 261)
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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67bc8b3
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Blau suffered from a mild form of messianism, an ailment as common among Jewish males as nearsightedness. (p. 264)
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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b1bca1a
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Ven mazel kumt, shtelt im a shtul. When mazel comes, pull up a chair for it. (p. 292)
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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eb931de
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Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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f78589b
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For Jascha, artistic creation was the most private activity in the world: the soul's sacred and solitary communion with itself. (p. 244)
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rebecca goldstein |
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29a001e
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And by the way, Sherlock Holmes is Jewish. He changed his name. I'm surprised you nerver guessed it. (p. 248)
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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1b43964
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Genius in a person was like weed that takes over the entire garden, that won't allow anything else to grow. (p. 251)
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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4f7ce1f
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Of course, I'm not one to judge people by their appearances, Rhonda, but from how this guy looked I would have said he had graduated high school with three friends tops, all of them in the computer club with him, and that he had some super-obscure hobby he was obsessed with, like collecting ancient musical instruments or making origami rocket ships that could break the sound barrier, and that, if he noticed women at all, he tried to impress..
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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5d8247c
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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." --
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leadership
education
self-discipline
maturation
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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a8cd439
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Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
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philosophy
perspective
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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fa1e12a
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Oh, there isn't any shortage of views clamoring to challenge my own. That's what we call the viewpoints of the pinheads, and fortunately nothing forces me to pay any attention to them. Except your own self-interest. This just keeps getting better. I'm supposed to pay attention to the pinheads out of my own self-interest? Otherwise you must do all the hard work of challenging your own positions all by yourself. Isn't it better to get some..
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refutations
scam
self-interest
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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131093e
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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."
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reputation
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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dffe172
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The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.
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significance
meaning-of-life
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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87cafed
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The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world itself must be self-explanatory.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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23f822d
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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 recognize..
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regard
recognition
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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204edfe
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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.
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education
parenting
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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1b1ad6a
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As Plato: 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.
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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fe05a75
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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.
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habits
decisions
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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f3fa470
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Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
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friendship
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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a99d675
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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?
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science
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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9851965
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Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.
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identity
patriotism
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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f3d4f56
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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.
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civic-virtue
government
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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daeaa11
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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.
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selectivity
college
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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d0308f8
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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.
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reputation
social-media
popularity
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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5b1a01f
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BURNS: I couldn't tell you what a sine, cosine, or tangent is if my life depended on it! And remember those word problems they used to torment us with: if one train leaves New York for Boston at 11 a.m. going 75 miles an hour, and another train leaves New York for Boston at 11:30 going 100 miles an hour, at what time will the operator of the first train text his wife that he left his lunch bag on the kitchen counter? PLATO: I do not under..
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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170d359
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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, " 'natural philosophy' became physics."
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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5021bf5
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Pythagoras, should he want to continue on for a degree in modern-day mathematics, would have to learn to abide far more counterintuitive results than numbers that cannot be written as ratios between whole numbers. From the square root of -1, to Georg Cantor's revelation of infinite domains infinitely more infinite than other infinite domains, to Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorems, mathematics has constantly displaced the borders between t..
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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6a900a8
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inside out, with all the Sturm und
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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2f37cb6
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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.
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Rebecca Goldstein |