About Rebecca Goldstein: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American novelist and philosopher. She has written six novels, a number of short stories and essays, and studies of mathematician Kurt Gödel and philosophers Baruch Spinoza and Plato.
Kleos is sometimes translated as "acoustic renown" the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. It's a bit like having a large Twitter following.
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question th...
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 accomplis...
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?
The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.
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 trick...
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.
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 argume...
What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?
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.
As Plato: 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.
Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)
Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.
Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.
