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And now having a child has been taken out of the sphere of biological determinism and placed instead in the domain of intentional action. Another option to consider and decide upon. And ... not to choose is to choose.

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
Another
Decide
Determinism
Children
Consider
Intentional
Choose
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Instead
Option
Child
Biological
Taken
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Action
Placed

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Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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?
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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 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'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.
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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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Philosophical progress changes what we take to be intuitively obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes. We don't see these changes, because we see with them.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
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