Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.

I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise. After all, all people - not just philosophers - have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better.

Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.

I would say to anybody who thinks that all the problems in philosophy can be translated into empirically verifiable answers - whether it be a Lawrence Krauss thinking that physics is rendering philosophy obsolete or a Sam Harris thinking that neuroscience is rendering moral philosophy obsolete - that it takes an awful lot of philosophy - philosophy of science in the first case, moral philosophy in the second - even to demonstrate the relevance of these empirical sciences.

The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.