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Book: Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away
Quotes of Book: Plato at the Googleplex: Why
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  1. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    Mathematicians prove all sorts of truths about numbers, truths that often assert the existence of certain numbers {for example, given two rational numbers, there exists a rational number between them} and sometimes the non-existence of certain numbers {for example, there exists no largest prime number}. But what does this talk of mathematical existence amount to? Do these proofs really have to do with existence in the same way that tables and chairs, the moon and the sun, and you and me exist? Or is mathematical existence something like saying that a particular move exists in chess-say, when a pawn has moved completely across the board to a square on the opponent's back row and can be exchanged for any piece, not just a piece that your opponent has captured, which can result in your having, say, two queens on the board?
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  2. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    Plato shared, with radical modifications, in the Ethos of the Extraordinary, and it led him to create philosophy as we know it. The kind of exertion that is required if one is to achieve a life worth living is philosophy as he understood it. It is our exertions in reason that make us matter-make us, to the extent that we can be, godlike.
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  3. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    One must exert oneself in order to achieve a life that matters. If you don't exert yourself, or if your exertions don't amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.
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  4. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    Pythagoras, should he want to continue on for a degree in modern-day mathematics, would have to learn to abide far more counterintuitive results than numbers that cannot be written as ratios between whole numbers. From the square root of −1, to Georg Cantor's revelation of infinite domains infinitely more infinite than other infinite domains, to Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems, mathematics has constantly displaced the borders between the conceivable and the inconceivable, and Pythagoras would be in for some long hours of awesome mind-blowing.
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  5. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    The melding of experimental techniques with mathematical description was the great leap forward, accomplished in the seventeenth century, that brought us to the point at which, as Krauss put it, " 'natural philosophy' became physics.
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  6. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    BURNS: I couldn't tell you what a sine, cosine, or tangent is if my life depended on it! And remember those word problems they used to torment us with: if one train leaves New York for Boston at 11 a.m. going 75 miles an hour, and another train leaves New York for Boston at 11:30 going 100 miles an hour, at what time will the operator of the first train text his wife that he left his lunch bag on the kitchen counter?PLATO: I do not understand the question.BURNS: Wow! I stumped Plato! Anyone?ZEE: At no time, since it's illegal for an operator to text while he's operating a train! "
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  7. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.
    book-quotepopularityreputationsocial-media

  8. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.
    book-quotecollegeselectivity

  9. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.
    book-quotegovernmentcivic-virtue

  10. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    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.
    book-quotepatriotismidentity

  11. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

    What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?
    book-quotescience

  12. Rebecca Goldstein _ Plato at the Googleplex: Why

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