Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.
Rebecca Goldstein
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Rebecca Goldstein
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: February 23
Author
Biographer
Classical Scholar
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
White Plains
New York
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Better
Plato
Done
Exposure
Solitary
Necessarily
Argumentative
Philosophy
Presumptions
Company
Gregarious
Rather
Presumption
Best
Conceived
More quotes by Rebecca Goldstein
I don't only act out of my character my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.
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
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
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
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
That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
Rebecca Goldstein
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
Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.
Rebecca Goldstein
Everybody is struggling to refine their views in opposition to the other people. And that's one of the most important things that philosophy actually has to teach us that you have to air your views and bring them to the table with people - with whom you disagree very much.
Rebecca Goldstein
Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.
Rebecca Goldstein
Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.
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
In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
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
