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

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

“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

“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

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics

“That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem

“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

“We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

“I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Mind-Body Problem

“It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, New American Haggadah

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

“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

“I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics

“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?”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

“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

“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

“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

“(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

“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

“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.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction