This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'