Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.
Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.
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.
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.
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 dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
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?
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, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)
This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.
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.
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.
He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.
It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.
Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn’t be prepared to make for other people.
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?
The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.
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.
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.
Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.