“So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.” PeopleMenKindImportantYoungMiddlePhilosophicalAskingSlaveYoung ManPeculiarHungUrbanPlatoWorth LivingAthensGorillasHanging AroundAristocraticGadflies Author:Rebecca Goldstein
“You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.” KnowsWayGivingHelpingUsePhilosophicalAskingTherapyPlatoHeadachePragmatismAspirinPragmatists Author:Richard Rorty
“Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness ot to answer any question we are capable of asking.” MindHardProblemAnswersDivineCapableAngelPhilosophicalAskingSolveMeaninglessOrganismsEquipmentHomo SapiensCognitive Author:Steven Pinker
“...life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.” IfsThinkingHumansPersonsLife IsAsksDecisionMoralConditionsDutyConsequencePhilosophicalAskingRenounceLife Is A GiftThinking Person Book:The Sense of an Ending Source: The Sense of an Ending
“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.” ThinkingKnowsHumansWellsMeanRealityFictionPhilosophicalAskingScience FictionWhat It Means To Be HumanPhilosophical Questions Author:Ted Chiang