Living rationally and authentically means understanding that life centrally involves making leaps of faith, both small and large, and that the value of living is to a large extent the value of experiencing your life, whatever that experience is.

I do think that metaphysical exploration is like scientific exploration, in the sense that philosophers and scientists are both developing models of reality, and furthermore that we all rely to a significant extent on the idea that models which provide elegant, simple and satisfying explanations are more likely to be true.

The distinctive contribution that metaphysics makes to our understanding of reality is first that it considers questions about features of reality that the sciences don't, such as the intrinsic nature of causation or the dynamic character of temporal experience.

I just realized, sometime early on in college, that I wanted to be a philosopher. I basically decided that I wanted to spend my life thinking as deeply and carefully and reflectively as I could about the nature of reality and our human engagement with it, and that taking a philosophical approach was the best way to go about doing this.

Living rationally and authentically means understanding that life centrally involves making leaps of faith, both small and large, and that the value of living is to a large extent the value of experiencing your life, whatever that experience is.

We should listen to both philosophers and scientists, because the philosophical contribution is different from the scientific contribution, and both of them are worthwhile.

Living rationally and authentically does not mean that you map out your future by thinking carefully about what it would be like if you chose one path versus another path and then choosing on that basis.