Quotes by Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“(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 m...”

“Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.”

“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....”

“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.”

“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)”

“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 c...”

“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.”

“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 m...”

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

“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...”

“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 philos...”

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

“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....”

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

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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?”

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