And now having a child has been taken out of the sphere of biological determinism and placed instead in the domain of intentional action. Another option to consider and decide upon. And ... not to choose is to choose.

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

It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

If you don't exert yourself, or if your exertions don't amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.

Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.

Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.

It was while I was studying philosophy that I came to understand. . . that it is no sign of moral or spiritual strength to believe that for which one has no evidence, neither a priori evidence as in math, nor a posteriori evidence as in science. . . . It's a violation almost immoral in its transgressiveness to shirk the responsibilities of rationality.