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

(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...

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?

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

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

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....

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

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

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...

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

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

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...

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....

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

McCoy: Oh, there isn’t any shortage of views clamoring to challenge my own. That’s what we call the viewpoints of the pinheads, and fortunately nothing forces me to pay any attention to them.Plato: Except your...

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.

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...

It has been claimed that Plato was an egalitarian; it has been claimed that he was a totalitarian. It has been claimed that he was the utopian, proposing a universal blueprint for the ideal state;...

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.

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.

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.

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....

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...

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....

Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

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.

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

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

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

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?

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand,...

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...

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...

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

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.

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...

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...