151 Quotes by Julian Baggini

If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it’s done for us lately.

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy’s pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.

It is intuitively plausible that if something has endured for centuries, there must be something in it. But on that logic, there must be something in slavery and the inequality of women.

Philosophy without criticism is like hunting deer without a shotgun, so, if you want people to like you, avoid robust philosophical debate.

Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I’m tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.

This is the deal: we are happy to single out people as superior just as long as they don’t accept the description themselves. We want heroes and idols, but we also want egalitarianism, and that requires proclamations of humility from our gods.

You know what a word means when you know how to use it, not what its definition is. That is why we can understand and use all sorts of words that we struggle to define clearly if we are put on the spot and asked to do so.