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 numbers21 that he...
Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.
Oh, there isn't any shortage of views clamoring to challenge my own. That's what we call the viewpoints of the pinheads, and fortunately nothing forces me to pay any attention to them. Except your own...
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. Bu...
The melding of experimental techniques with mathematical description was the great leap forward, accomplished in the seventeenth century, that brought us to the point at which, as Krauss put it, ‘nat...
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...
I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the maki...
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?
BURNS: I couldn’t tell you what a sine, cosine, or tangent is if my life depended on it! And remember those word problems they used to torment us with: if one train leaves New York for Boston at 11 a...
As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.
S death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists . . . A person whom one ha...
This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.
I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy.
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...
Leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The
It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated...
He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.
Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive ar...
Blau suffered from a mild form of messianism, an ailment as common among Jewish males as nearsightedness. (p. 264)
We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah.
