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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
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White Plains
New York
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
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More quotes by Rebecca Goldstein
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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Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
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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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It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
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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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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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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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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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That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
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Are there experts, ethical experts, that's very offensive to all of us? Because it's part of our humanity to have a stake in these questions to feel that we ourselves know the difference between right and wrong. And then along come these experts, philosophers, claiming, you know, an expertise, a special training, a special skill, a special talent.
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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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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.
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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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Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
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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.
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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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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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Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed.
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