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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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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Rebecca Goldstein
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: February 23
Author
Biographer
Classical Scholar
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Philosopher
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White Plains
New York
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Wonder
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Everybody
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Religion
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Forcefully
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Wondering
People
Failure
Address
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Philosophy
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More quotes by Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.
Rebecca Goldstein
We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.
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
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
Rebecca Goldstein
In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
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
Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
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
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?
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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
Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
One doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear on his focus, has some causal connection to the circumstances of his life.
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
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein