Rebecca Goldstein Quotes

No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?

~ Rebecca Goldstein

(As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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 achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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 making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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 philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter Nike and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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?

~ Rebecca Goldstein

That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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)

~ Rebecca Goldstein

This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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 that is us.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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 to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The

~ Rebecca Goldstein

how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience

~ Rebecca Goldstein

When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then... what?

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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?

~ Rebecca Goldstein

The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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 being.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both – that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy. In the case of arate, the direction of the because can seem a little vaguer, so that it can sometimes seem almost as if someone is regarded as worthy because they are recognized.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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 artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.

~ Rebecca Goldstein