It occurred to me that I had the duty to give society something in exchange for the free education I was getting.

Whereas science elicits changes in order to know, technology knows in order to elicit changes.

I pity the babies whose mothers are busy texting trivialities instead of playing with their children; I pity the children who are tethered to their cell phones instead of playing ball; I pity the adolescents who are wasting their best years holding one of those artefacts instead of the hand of another young person.

Contemporary philosophers are facing problems that were unthinkable only one century ago, such as whether space and time are mutually Independent, whether there is objective chance or only uncertainty, whether physics can explain chemical change, whether our behavior is fully determined by our genomes, whether ideation can change the brain, or whether either the economy or ideas are the ultimate roots of the social.

There is a continuum between science and philosophy. As Fichte said (but did not practice), philosophy should be the science of sciences.

Under theocracies and other authoritarian regimes, the rulers are the moral authorities. Under genuine democracy some basic values are entrenched in the legal system, which is expected to be under democratic vigilance, and others are left to the person or the group, which ideally debate moral problems in a rational, free and cooperative manner.

From a historical viewpoint, religion is just a kind of superstition, and from a political viewpoint it is a tool of social control.