Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good. Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.

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

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.

What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.

I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher's positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm distinction doesn't lead me to endorse the usual way in which history of philosophy is presented.

Because of the failure of religion to offer satisfying answers to an increasing number of people, it's time for philosophy to address forcefully these questions that everybody is wondering about.

Philosophy is this amazing technique we've devised for getting reality to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. Science itself can't make those arguments. You actually have to rely on philosophy, on philosophy of science.