One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes these failed solutions are scientific, and sometimes they are religious, and sometimes they are based on… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share Image
So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do… — 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 Image
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die. — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share Image
When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed, then… — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share
Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind. — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
In order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share Image
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 Image
What one tries to force into a child against its own nature will never come to good. — Rebecca Goldstein Copy Share Image
