Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can infinitize us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to la...
Is 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 h...
I feel an immediate closeness to anyone who loves New York or hates Los Angeles. Either condition is sufficient, but I’ve found that satisfaction of the one usually entails satisfaction of the other.
Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
2. The Ontological Argument Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of God). It is greater to exist than not to exist. If we conceive of God as not exis...
One evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts t...
The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more...
The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding.
The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world it...
Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its p...
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 shown up for your existence at all.
And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)
