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Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
Rebecca Goldstein
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Rebecca Goldstein
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: February 23
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Classical Scholar
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Philosopher
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White Plains
New York
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
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More quotes by 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
Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
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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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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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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
Philosophers feel a little more cautious about letting down their technical guard lest the general public doesn't recognize their special credentials. It's the fact that philosophy is of general interest that, paradoxically, keeps philosophers from wanting to speak in a way that's accessible to the general public.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
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
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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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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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.
Rebecca Goldstein
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
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
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
That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
Rebecca Goldstein
It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
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
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
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
