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

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
Often
Science
Makes
Something
Never
Opposed
Progress
Philosophy

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Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
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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?
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Youth is not an essential, but rather an accidental property. Nobody is in essence young. One either ceases to be or ceases to be young.
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What is love? When you love somebody then I mean we all want good things to happen to ourselves and keep the bad things at bay. When you love somebody you want that as much for them if not more than you do for yourself.
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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.
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I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.
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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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It's very important to remember that the philosophers were social dissidents. They were social critics. The man in the street or woman in the street did not particularly cherish what they said. Socrates was killed.
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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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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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Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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