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.
I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.
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.
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.
we live now in circumstances that encourage rather than discourage lying; evidence and activity are more easily concealed, and the need to rely on demeanor as an indicator of a person’s truthfulness is greater. And our evolutionary history has not ...
In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.
Socrates insisted that there's a strong connection between your philosophy (how you interpret the world, what you think is important in life) and your mental and physical health. Different beliefs lead to different emotional states...
Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.
Most people, if philosophy touches them, they shatter, they atomize, they turn to dust. It is win/lose between philosophy and delusion, and most people are almost entirely composed of delusion. They're only allowed as much reality as serves the maste...
And as I stumbled onto Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, it was the first time I had ever read any sort of philosophy that really made a tremendous amount of sense. What I liked that was missing from my experience of Christianity growing up was a sort...
I see a sense of unity in the universe. Spirituality is not limited to only one religion. One can experience it across different religions. I am fascinated by philosophy of Advaita and philosophy of unity. We have to get over the illusion that God is...
One of the great problems of philosophy, is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be. I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tri...
World Class leaders know the secret to motivating themselves and others is discovering what they will fight for when the going gets rough.
…it can hardly be over-exaggerated that speculative thinking is always drawn from the necessities of the time, that it is always practical, that it always shifts with the interests of the times, with the changes of social, economic, and political c...
The question, therefore, is not whether one should teach philosophy to Muslim students, but rather what kind or kinds of philosophy should be taught and how the subject should be approached.
The language of Cat's generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting?
Every age, and especially our own, stands in need of a ; but the difficulty is in finding men who have the courage to be one, and men who have the patience to endure one.
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?
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.
When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the phi...
