The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.

Does God have a reason for wanting us to be charitable, to take care of those who can't take care of themselves? Either God does or God doesn't, it's just logic. If God has a reason then there is a reason independent of God and whatever God's reason is we should figure it out for ourselves. There is a reason and God doesn't really ground morality at all. God wants us to give charity because it's the right thing to do.

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.

Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

From the beginning philosophy sought for The order behind the disorder Thales sipped cheap wine And in this did divine: "Why it's nothing at all but pure water!"

One of the interesting things about the ancient Greeks is that they really didn't have our conception of individual rights. They didn't have our conception of all lives matters. And it was really was true for them, that certain lives matter a lot more than others. It didn't dawn on them that all lives, although different, can be lives of equal mattering. And that is actually something a huge ethical lesson.

When the first people started to argue against slavery, for example, this was a new idea. If you crowd-source, you'd never come up with this. And so the - exactly the kind of progress we've made couldn't be made if we depend it on crowd-sourcing.