80 Quotes by Rebecca Goldstein

What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.

Having your husband at a party is like adding anchovies to a salad. I love anchovies, but you can’t taste anything else.

So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that’s what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It’s where we’re just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.

I’m a Spinozist. I believe in reason. I think all the progress that we’ve made making this a better world have been because of reason and not religion. I think religion has been pulled along by reason and that’s why we read The Bible now so differently, even believers.

Everybody is struggling to refine their views in opposition to the other people. And that’s one of the most important things that philosophy actually has to teach us that you have to air your views and bring them to the table with people – with whom you disagree very much.

Philosophical progress changes what we take to be “intuitively” obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes. We don’t see these changes, because we see with them.

Youth is not an essential, but rather an accidental property. Nobody is in essence young. One either ceases to be or ceases to be young.

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 the – exactly the kind of progress we’ve made couldn’t be made if we depend it on crowd-sourcing.

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 place.