One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes th….

We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live moral lives and for there to be morality in the first pl….

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

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, ….

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and I wouldn't say so much it's informed my views, but it's informed my interest, so I think as a child ….

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….

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 ad….

I would say to anybody who thinks that all the problems in philosophy can be translated into empirically verifiable answers - whether it be a Lawrenc….

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 ….

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 ….

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 ….

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

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

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….

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….

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

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

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….

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….

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….

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