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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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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Rebecca Goldstein
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: February 23
Author
Biographer
Classical Scholar
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
White Plains
New York
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Good
Spent
Sick
Kitchens
Dying
Billboards
Less
Visits
Money
Soup
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Kitchen
Make
Organized
More quotes by Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
Everyone loves a hero. What we differ on is the question of who the heroes are, because we differ over what matters. And who matters is a function of what matters. [If] what matters is intelligence, the people who matter are the intelligent, and the people who matter the most, the heroes, are the geniuses.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Rebecca Goldstein
Are there experts, ethical experts, that's very offensive to all of us? Because it's part of our humanity to have a stake in these questions to feel that we ourselves know the difference between right and wrong. And then along come these experts, philosophers, claiming, you know, an expertise, a special training, a special skill, a special talent.
Rebecca Goldstein
It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
Rebecca Goldstein
I'm a Spinozist. I believe in reason. I think all the progress that we've made making this a better world have been because of reason and not religion. I think religion has been pulled along by reason and that's why we read The Bible now so differently, even believers.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world.
Rebecca Goldstein
Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.
Rebecca Goldstein
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?
Rebecca Goldstein
So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that's what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It's where we're just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.
Rebecca Goldstein
Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.
Rebecca Goldstein
In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
Rebecca Goldstein
Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
Everybody is struggling to refine their views in opposition to the other people. And that's one of the most important things that philosophy actually has to teach us that you have to air your views and bring them to the table with people - with whom you disagree very much.
Rebecca Goldstein
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
Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
Rebecca Goldstein
That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
Rebecca Goldstein
