Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.

I think if there were to be a solution to the problem of free will, it would have to be a compatibilist one. Unfortunately, from that it does not follow that there is such a solution. Many philosophers find this an unwelcome message, and as often happens in philosophy, they punish the messenger by ascribing to him an entirely imaginary but untenable position.

I wish that our culture could retain the symbolism and emotional power of traditional religion while combining it with reason and science and using the combination to enhance our humanity rather than impoverishing it by choosing the one side or the other.

Marx is thought of as an implacable foe of capitalism. But go back and read the first section of the Communist Manifesto. Notice how it contains a paean of praise for the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie have both enriched the human powers of production and also enabled us to see with clear vision the nature of human society and human history.

Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. Philosophy is more about the latter than the former.

In any matter of moral importance, our first task, before we plunge ahead and decide what to do, is to figure out what we ought to do.

Virtues consist not only of acting in certain ways, but in ways of caring and feeling.