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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
Taken
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Upon
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Placed
Another
Decide
Determinism
Children
Consider
Intentional
Choose
Sphere
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Child
Biological

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I think the humanities always have to take science, our great knowledge that we get from science, into account, but then try to answer the human questions and try to make sense out of our lives, taking into account all of the scientific knowledge.
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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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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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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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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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Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.
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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 numbers 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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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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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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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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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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To matter ... Is there any human will deeper than that? ... We don't want to live when we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never matter. ... We no sooner discover that we are than we desperately want that which we are to matter.
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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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It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
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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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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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Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
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We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world.
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That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
Rebecca Goldstein