Rebecca Goldstein

Youth is not an essential, but rather an accidental property. Nobody is in essence young. One either ceases to be or ceases…

— Rebecca Goldstein

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

— Rebecca Goldstein

When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this…

— Rebecca Goldstein

“Freedom for me is a pain in the Buridan's ass.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.

— Rebecca Goldstein

“one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon…

— 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…

— Rebecca Goldstein

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

We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live…

— Rebecca Goldstein

In order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it.

— Rebecca Goldstein

Philosophical progress changes what we take to be "intuitively" obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that…

— Rebecca Goldstein

What one tries to force into a child against its own nature will never come to good.

— Rebecca Goldstein

Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

— Rebecca Goldstein

What is remarkable about the Greeks - even pre-philosophically - is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when…

— Rebecca Goldstein

In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.

— Rebecca Goldstein

We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world.

— Rebecca Goldstein

“We each carry our own designated end within us, our very own death ripening at its own rate inside of us. There…

— Rebecca Goldstein

Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God…

— Rebecca Goldstein

“Blau suffered from a mild form of messianism, an ailment as common among Jewish males as nearsightedness. (p. 264)”

— Rebecca Goldstein

Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them…

— Rebecca Goldstein

“From the beginning philosophy sought for The order behind the disorder                Thales sipped cheap wine                And in this did divine: “Why it’s…

— Rebecca Goldstein

Everybody is struggling to refine their views in opposition to the other people. And that's one of the most important things that…

— Rebecca Goldstein

One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the…

— 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…

— 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…

— Rebecca Goldstein