We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah.
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
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.
Blau suffered from a mild form of messianism, an ailment as common among Jewish males as nearsightedness. (p. 264)
So did he answer you? I finally had to ask her after a considerable pause, accompanied by the tapping of her fingernails. (illustration credit ill.3) Not really, she said. I’m not sure giving answers...
If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view....
As Plato: It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.
Leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The
Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosoph...
Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
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.
What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?
Plato shared, with radical modifications, in the Ethos of the Extraordinary, and it led him to create philosophy as we know it. The kind of exertion that is required if one is to achieve a life worth...
Of course, I’m not one to judge people by their appearances, Rhonda, but from how this guy looked I would have said he had graduated high school with three friends tops, all of them in the computer cl...
In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive h...
In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.
The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.
The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved’s reckl...
Philosophical thinking that doesn’t do violence to one’s settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.