Plato at the Googleplex 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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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?”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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).”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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)”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“...(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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“(I)n order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. (p. 158)”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“(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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go 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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“Philosophical thinking that doesn’t do violence to one’s settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“...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)”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“Shoket: ... You've got physics and cosmology closing in on the age-old problem of why there's something rather than nothing—that's one you philosophers, not to speak of theologians, have been chewing over a while. With we neuroscientists explaining consciousness, free will, and morality, what's left for the philosophers to ponder?

Plato: Perhaps self-deception?”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“We achieve a life worth living by understanding how the cosmos achieved an existence worth existing.
The impersonally sublime is internalized into personal virtue.
Plato: "For measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas as beauty and virtue”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“Exiting the ideological cave, where all our questions are answered and everyone we know agrees with us, is the hardest and most significant step we can take. But if we don't take that step, then we will leave this life no closer to the truth than when we entered it. And that is exactly what it is to live a life not worth living, even if it proves to be the most pleasant sort of existence.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“It is no accident that Athens was the home not only of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but also of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Their approach to the question of what makes a human life worth living created not only the conditions for the great tragic dramatists but also the audiences for them. Those audiences did not shrink from confronting the possibility that human life, tragically, is not worth living. Perhaps we don't matter and nothing can be done to make us matter. Or, only slightly less tragic, perhaps there is something that will redeem that life by singling it out as extraordinary, and only then it will matter. It is only an ordinary life--with nothing to distinguish it from the great masses of other anonymous lives that have come before us and will come after us--that doesn't matter. There is a profound pitilessness in this proposition and there was a pronounced pitilessness in the ancient Greeks. One must exert oneself in order to achieve a life that matters. If you don't exert yourself, or if your exertion does not amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away