Rebecca Goldstein Quotes

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.

A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.

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.

We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah.

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

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

I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy.

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

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?

Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

We each carry our own designated end within us, our very own death ripening at its own rate inside of us. There are insignificant people who are harboring unawares the grandeur of large deaths. We carry it in us like a darkening fruit. It opens and spills out. That is death.

The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.

Our failures in charity are chained to a narrowed vision of the world that makes too much of the differences between us, and this is our enslavement.

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.

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.

Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to.

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.

I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.

[The works of Professor Pezhman Mosleh] are artistic treasures.

On the Threshold by Professor Pezhman Mosleh is an artistic treasure for a treasured human being (Dr. Irvin Yalom).

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

The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision — are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.

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.

Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.

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)

The guardians of the just state should be the most underprivileged of all its citizens. It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

(I)n order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. (p. 158)

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

RE: Kindle, iPad, et cetera: For a researcher, these new ways of accessing information are just extraordinary. I thing it introduces the possibility of a new standard of cognitive exactness and precision. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, author of Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics.

The artistry of the writing is meant to stir the whole of our person, since it’s the whole of that person who must feel the force of philosophy and be changed as a consequence.

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.

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?

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.

...(W)hat is remarkable about the Greeks--even pre-philosophically--is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens.

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.

(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.

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?

Reality is infinite and we are finite and so there is a necessary mismatch between our knowledge of the world and the world itself.

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

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

Freedom for me is a pain in the Buridan's ass.

Philosophical thinking that doesn’t do violence to one’s settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

For Goddsakes, am I, who carries an entire world within me, a body?

As Plato: It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

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.

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 itself must be self-explanatory.

And if the prodigious genius of Azarya Sheiner has never found the solution, then perhaps that is proof that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility that assutalts us from all sides. And so we try, as best we cn, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise what are we?

Einstein’s and Gödel’s metaconvictions were addressed to the question of whether their respective fields are descriptions of an objective reality—existing independent of our thinking of it—or, rather, are subjective human projections, socially shared intellectual constructs.

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.

In a field like philosophy, where understanding involves not so much the reception of knowledge but rather a transformation of the receiver itself, so that the receiver, which is to say the student, can generate the knowledge for him- or herself, then the physical presence of the teacher is essential.

All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision — are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.

You are summoned for no reason other than that you are a Jew, as if "Jew" were a mass term comparable, say, to "water" or "salt." Here is a bit of water, we say, and any sample of it will do. All water manifests itself the same interchangeable water properties. That a Nazi should think this way about Jews is not in the least surprising. Mass terms, mass murders, mass graves: they are all of a piece.

I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher's positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm distinction doesn't lead me to endorse the usual way in which history of philosophy is presented. ... The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse. The subject is far more interesting than that. ... When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed, then you've entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification. You have to keep them straight.... ...(T)he assessment of those intuitions in terms of the argument's soundness isn't accomplished by work done in the context of discovery. And conversely, one doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear on his focus, has some causal connection to the circumstances of his life (pp. 160-161).

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,

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 a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifest in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image - a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being.

His religion asks us to do something that is far more difficult for us than the most severe practices of asceticism. It asks us to be reasonable. It asks us to look at ourselves with unblinking objectivity. It asks us to subdue our natural inclinations toward self-aggrandizement, our attempts to shore up our dreadful fragility by fictions of a God who favors us because we were born—thank God!—into the right group, or have gone through the nuisance of converting to it. And it asks us, as well, to face squarely the terror of our own mortality.

s 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 has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer’s day while I cannot?

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 has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer’s day while I cannot?

...Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better. This is why discussion around the table is so essential. This is why philosophy must be argumentative. It proceeds by way of arguments, and the arguments are argued over. Everything is aired in the bracing dialectic wind stirred by many clashing viewpoints. Only in this way can intuitions that have their source in societal or personal idiosyncrasies be exposed and questioned. ... There can be nothing like "Well, that's what I was brought up to believe," or "I just feel that it's right," or "I am privy to an authoritative voice whispering in my ear," or "I'm demonstrably smarter than all of you, so just accept that I know better here." The discussion around the seminar table countenances only the sorts of arguments and considerations that can, in principle, make a claim on everyone who signs on to the project of reason: appealing to, evaluating, and being persuaded by reasons. (pp. 38-39)

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; it has been claimed that he was an anti-utopian, demonstrating that all political idealism is folly. It has been claimed that he was a populist, concerned with the best interests of all citizens; it has been claimed he was an elitist with disturbing eugenic tendencies. It has been claimed he was a romantic; it has been claimed that he was a prick. It has been claimed that he was a theorizer, with sweeping metaphysical doctrines; it has been claimed that he was the anti-theorizing skeptic, always intent on unsettling convictions. It has been claimed that he was full of humor and play; it has been claimed that he was as solemn as a sermon limining the torments of the damned. It has been claimed he loved his fellow man; it has been claimed he loves his fellow man. It has been claimed he was a philosopher who used his artistic gifts in the service of philosophy; it has been claimed he was an artist who used philosophy in the service of his art.

My gratitude goes as well to the other data scientists I pestered and to the institutions that collect and maintain their data: Karlyn Bowman, Daniel Cox (PRRI), Tamar Epner (Social Progress Index), Christopher Fariss, Chelsea Follett (HumanProgress), Andrew Gelman, Yair Ghitza, April Ingram (Science Heroes), Jill Janocha (Bureau of Labor Statistics), Gayle Kelch (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Alaina Kolosh (National Safety Council), Kalev Leetaru (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone), Monty Marshall (Polity Project), Bruce Meyer, Branko Milanović (World Bank), Robert Muggah (Homicide Monitor), Pippa Norris (World Values Survey), Thomas Olshanski (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Amy Pearce (Science Heroes), Mark Perry, Therese Pettersson (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Stephen Radelet, Auke Rijpma (OECD Clio Infra), Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Google Trends), James X. Sullivan, Sam Taub (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Kyla Thomas, Jennifer Truman (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Jean Twenge, Bas van Leeuwen (OECD Clio Infra), Carlos Vilalta, Christian Welzel (World Values Survey), Justin Wolfers, and Billy Woodward (Science Heroes). David Deutsch, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Kevin Kelly, John Mueller, Roslyn Pinker, Max Roser, and Bruce Schneier read a draft of the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice.

There’s the claim that the only progress made is in posing problems that scientists can answer. That philosophy never has the means to answer problems—it’s just biding its time till the scientists arrive on the scene. You hear this quite often. There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. But there’s a lot of philosophical progress, it’s just a progress that’s very hard to see. It’s very hard to see because we see with it. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world. [...] And it’s usually philosophical arguments that first introduce the very outlandish idea that we need to extend rights. And it takes more, it takes a movement, and activism, and emotions, to affect real social change. It starts with an argument, but then it becomes obvious. The tracks of philosophy’s work are erased because it becomes intuitively obvious. The arguments against slavery, against cruel and unusual punishment, against unjust wars, against treating children cruelly—these all took arguments. About 30 years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer started to argue about the way animals are treated in our factory farms. Everybody thought he was nuts. But I’ve watched this movement grow; I’ve watched it become emotional. It has to become emotional. You have to draw empathy into it. But here it is, right in our time—a philosopher making the argument, everyone dismissing it, but then people start discussing it.

What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me. Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one? 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 has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic.

The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved’s recklessness, for the sake of the sweetness that is there, and the shudder only makes more violent the shuddering that announces love (Phaedrus 251). I do not think, but for that sweetness, the friend of whom I spoke would have become impassioned as he did and he would have recognized that such a one, entirely wanting in the desire to become better than what he knows himself to be, was not worthy of his love. She who signs herself “I Don’t Know How (Or If) to Love Him” repeated the word “exciting” three times. A VBB (and let us remember that there are also, though perhaps they are rarer, VBGs) creates around himself or herself a separate world in which all that happens is exciting, for exciting it must be. Excitement is the air they breathe, and they cannot exist without it. And when they pull others into their world, then these others leave the world of common air and now they breathe the rare air of excitement, which they are not accustomed to, and in their confused state they are more apt to think that the excitement they breathe is the excitement of love. She asks whether she should continue to love her VBB, but I do not think she really loves him, just as he, and this for a certainty, does not love her. For I think even the best man of his day of whom I just wrote did not love that boy as he thought he did. Perhaps if your questioner thinks more on the true nature of the excitement she feels, she will be able to see the wisdom of the course of action that you and I both urge on her, and then she will find the strength to break the spell that her VBB casts upon her. Last, let her think on this, that though love is a profound disturbance, not all profound disturbances are love.

In Greek, our word for play is paidia and the word for education is paideia, and it is very natural and right that these words should be entangled at the root, together with our word for children, paides, which gave you your words pedagogy and pediatrician.14 What one tries to force into a child against its own nature will never come to good. A child’s natural form of behavior is play, and in our aim to educate, play should be honored and preserved for as long past childhood as can be. So we may say, in fact, the sum and substance of education is the right training that effectually leads the soul of the child at play on to the love of the calling in its adult life (Laws 643d).

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

It was intolerable what lay hidden within another, intolerable tat you could not divide one person into another with no remainder.

Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.

the recent novel by his wife Rebecca Goldstein, entitled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, subtitled A Work of Fiction). The

BURNS: I couldn’t tell you what a sine, cosine, or tangent is if my life depended on it! Audience laughter. And remember those word problems they used to torment us with: if one train leaves New York for Boston at 11 a.m. going 75 miles an hour, and another train leaves New York for Boston at 11:30 going 100 miles an hour, at what time will the operator of the first train text his wife that he left his lunch bag on the kitchen counter? PLATO: I do not understand the question. BURNS: Wow! I stumped Plato! Anyone? ZEE: At no time, since it’s illegal for an operator to text while he’s operating a train! Audience laughter and applause

If we don’t understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools,

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 existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2). To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3). It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4). God exists. This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033–1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say, “Unicorns don’t exist.” The claim of The Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this generalization. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it’s not so easy to figure out what it is. FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in The Ontological Argument—it is to treat “existence” as a property, like “being fat” or “having ten fingers.” The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that “existence” is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat “existence” as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as “a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists.” So, if you think about a trunicorn, you’re thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore, trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.

inside out, with all the Sturm und

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one “comes out” as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch. You ought to have sent up a balloon now and then to get a read on the prevailing cognitive conditions, the Thinks watching out for the Think-Nots. Now you’ve gone and let the stockpiling of fallacies reach dangerous levels, and the massed weapons of illogic are threatening the survivability of the globe.

If we don’t understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools, Plato said, which I thought was a very astute observation, especially considering how little it turned out that he actually knew about Google or really anything about the Internet. I

And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers21 that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.

So did he answer you? I finally had to ask her after a considerable pause, accompanied by the tapping of her fingernails. (illustration credit ill.3) Not really, she said. I’m not sure giving answers is in his bag of tricks. He seems to be more about messing with your mind so that you can’t stop thinking about his questions. And if he thinks I can afford to keep stepping out of time like this, with my schedule, then, well, he’s just way off. Maybe

In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.

Genius in a person was like weed that takes over the entire garden, that won't allow anything else to grow. (p. 251)

Hershel Blau, son of the Chasidic wandering preacher, was not yet so distant from his father's world that he didn't know deep in his soul the yearning to fly. What is a Chasid's dance but one long, sustained attempt to arch away into suspended ascension, beyond laws of bodies, a thing of air and light and fire? (p. 261)

Jewish Warsaw, which was roughly a third of Warsaw proper, was a city of rabbis and swindlers, capitalists and poets; but, most of all, it was a city of talkers. There were so many ideas in the air you could get an education simply by breathing deeply. (p. 206)

And by the way, Sherlock Holmes is Jewish. He changed his name. I'm surprised you nerver guessed it. (p. 248)

Ven mazel kumt, shtelt im a shtul. When mazel comes, pull up a chair for it. (p. 292)

Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

Of course, I’m not one to judge people by their appearances, Rhonda, but from how this guy looked I would have said he had graduated high school with three friends tops, all of them in the computer club with him, and that he had some super-obscure hobby he was obsessed with, like collecting ancient musical instruments or making origami rocket ships that could break the sound barrier, and that, if he noticed women at all, he tried to impress them with how many decimal places of pi he had memorized.

epimeleia heautou,

There's no reason. Mazel, Maurice. Only mazel.” (p. 343)

Blau suffered from a mild form of messianism, an ailment as common among Jewish males as nearsightedness. (p. 264)

Is it a true story?” Sorel had asked Fraydel. “S'iz an emesa mysah?” (p. 100)

For Jascha, artistic creation was the most private activity in the world: the soul's sacred and solitary communion with itself. (p. 244)

Vu iz do a vasser on a zamd? Vu is do a melech on a land? Dos vasser fun oyg iz on zamd. Der melech in kortn iz on land. Where is there water without sand? Where is there a king without land? Tears from the eyes are withoud sand. The king of cards has no land. (p. 72)

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 provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.

I couldn't help but nod agreement to this observation: The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.  Of course, he lost me on the very next sentence.  Avoidance of a global war of civilizations depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics. "What crap."  I felt like I was speaking directly to him.  "Avoid a global war my ass.  We're in a fucking global war, you moron." I kept reading, fascinated someone so smart could understand so clearly that hate, envy, and mistrust dominate not just the lives of people but of civilizations as well, and yet avoid the obvious conclusion that survival demands getting rid of those people who hate, envy, and mistrust you.  Academics really do live in ivory towers.  If this Huntington guy had spent just a few days in my world, he'd have come to more sensible conclusions. By sunset, I'd struggled through about a third of the book.  That and finding a secluded bush where I could piss after drinking a whole thermos of coffee was all I accomplished.  The only other park visitors that day were women with baby strollers.  I watched them all anyway.  Maybe Rebecca Goldstein was smart enough to pass herself off as a mom walking her kid.  But none of them headed down the path toward the footbridge.  Finally I caught the bus back to my apartment, fixed myself a sandwich and drank a beer before hitting the

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, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

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 language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the “small group of people.

One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes these failed solutions are scientific, and sometimes they are religious, and sometimes they are based on what is called plain common sense.

Plato presents Socrates as always maintaining a certain distance from the personal crisis in which he finds himself. He is not going to let a contretemps like being brought up on a capital offense interfere with his pursuing the philosophical subjects that interest him.18 The positioning of the personal drama—being accused, convicted, imprisoned, and executed—as a mere backdrop to discussions of timeless questions is meant itself to convey a moral lesson. To reflect on the conditions that make a life worth living is to remove oneself from the circumstances of that life as much as possible. It is to see that life in the context of a perspective that does not take the contingencies of that particular life that you happen to be living overly seriously. To philosophize is to prepare to die.

Of the twenty-six dialogues of Plato, the internal dramas of seven of them are set during the spring and summer of 399: Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Sophist, Statesman, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.