You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.

What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.