“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?”

“Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.”

“Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.”

“RE: Kindle, iPad, et cetera: For a researcher, these new ways of accessing information are just extraordinary. I thing it introduces the possibility of a new standard of cognitive exactness and precision. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, author of 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.”

“Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.”

“Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.”

“When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both – that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy. In the case of arate, the direction of the "because" can seem a little vaguer, so that it can sometimes seem almost as if someone is regarded as worthy because they are recognized.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.”