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.

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed, then you've entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification.

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

So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that's what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It's where we're just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.

Philosophical progress changes what we take to be "intuitively" obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes. We don't see these changes, because we see with them.

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.