And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share Image
Youth is not an essential, but rather an accidental property. Nobody is in essence young. One either ceases to be or ceases to be… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die. — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
“one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
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… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
If we look at our attitudes consistently and work out the logical implications we're on the road to moral progress, moral understanding. — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live moral lives… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
In order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
Philosophical progress changes what we take to be "intuitively" obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
What one tries to force into a child against its own nature will never come to good. — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
What is remarkable about the Greeks - even pre-philosophically - is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all. — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
