Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
One must exert oneself in order to achieve a life that matters. If you don’t exert yourself, or if your exertions don’t amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have sho...
Epimeleia heautou,
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.
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...
If we don’t understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools, Plato said, which I thought was a very astute observation, especially considering how little it turn...
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: We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness th...
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?
There's no reason. Mazel, Maurice. Only mazel. (p. 343)
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...
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.
I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.
Hershel Blau, son of the Chasidic wandering preacher, was not yet so distant from his father's world that he didn't know deep in his soul the yearning to fly. What is a Chasid's dance but one long, su...
Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to.
Philosophical thinking that doesn’t do violence to one’s settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.
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, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
