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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.

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
Problem
Problems
Even
Realizing
Thinking
Answers
Philosophy
Everybody
Array
Almost
Thinks
Possible
Difficulty
Sense
Realize

More quotes by Rebecca Goldstein

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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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Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
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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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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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Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
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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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Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
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That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
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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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Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.
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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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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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Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.
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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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Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.
Rebecca Goldstein
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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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
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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?
Rebecca Goldstein
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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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Math . . . music .. . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It's a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it's not. It's an essentially human experience.
Rebecca Goldstein