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 you….

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 ….

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

God doesn't help. I think that's a knockdown argument. I think that it really shows that whatever moral knowledge we have and whatever moral progress….

I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any speci….

Math . . . music .. . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It's a sense….

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

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 ….

To matter, to mind. ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. ... Can anyone truthfully say, I do….

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….

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….

If we look at our attitudes consistently and work out the logical implications we're on the road to moral progress, moral understanding..

From the beginning philosophy sought for The order behind the disorder Thales sipped cheap wine And in this did divine: "Why it's nothing at all but ….

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 ques….

Thinking is the soul speaking to itself..

It was while I was studying philosophy that I came to understand. . . that it is no sign of moral or spiritual strength to believe that for which one….

The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discour….

I'm a Spinozist. I believe in reason. I think all the progress that we've made making this a better world have been because of reason and not religio….

Our society is falling back increasingly on rampant consumerism and self-promoting social media as a way for people to feel that their lives matter -….

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

What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because w….