Rebecca Goldstein famous quotes

03-28-2025

Math . . . music .. . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It's a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it's not. It's an essentially human experience.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Religious #Atheist #Math
Everybody have equal rights to a life of full flourishing. Philosophy slowly, slowly has given us arguments saying, look, you already committed to your own life flourishing, and you're being inconsistent if you don't expand it. So philosophy often works in trying to show us that there's an inner incoherence in our points of view. We're all committed to one thing when it comes to us and our own kind, but we're not willing to expand it and we're guilty of inconsistency.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Philosophy #Rights #Views
What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We donâ€™t see it, because we see with it.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Intuition #Forget #Argument
Philosophy is this amazing technique we've devised for getting reality to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. Science itself can't make those arguments. You actually have to rely on philosophy, on philosophy of science.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Philosophy #Reality #Answers
So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that's what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It's where we're just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Hippie #Cutting #Reality
One of the interesting things about the ancient Greeks is that they really didn't have our conception of individual rights. They didn't have our conception of all lives matters. And it was really was true for them, that certain lives matter a lot more than others. It didn't dawn on them that all lives, although different, can be lives of equal mattering. And that is actually something a huge ethical lesson.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Rights #Interesting #Greek
Everybody is struggling to refine their views in opposition to the other people. And that's one of the most important things that philosophy actually has to teach us that you have to air your views and bring them to the table with people - with whom you disagree very much.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Philosophy #Struggle #Air
When the first people started to argue against slavery, for example, this was a new idea. If you crowd-source, you'd never come up with this. And so the - exactly the kind of progress we've made couldn't be made if we depend it on crowd-sourcing.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Ideas #People #Progress
Are there experts, ethical experts, that's very offensive to all of us? Because it's part of our humanity to have a stake in these questions to feel that we ourselves know the difference between right and wrong. And then along come these experts, philosophers, claiming, you know, an expertise, a special training, a special skill, a special talent.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Skills #Differences #Humanity
It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Philosophy #Progress #Said
It's very important to remember that the philosophers were social dissidents. They were social critics. The man in the street or woman in the street did not particularly cherish what they said. Socrates was killed.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Men #Important #Philosopher
So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Plato #Philosophical #Men
I think the humanities always have to take science, our great knowledge that we get from science, into account, but then try to answer the human questions and try to make sense out of our lives, taking into account all of the scientific knowledge.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Thinking #Humanity #Trying
Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good. Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Thinking #Compassion #Sick
Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Sick #Generosity #Feel Good
That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Worry #Becoming #Being Me
In fact, itâ€™s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Facts
Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Answers #Forget
I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.
-- Rebecca Goldstein

#Soul #Body #Mysterious

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