Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger, because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can't hope to attain through hard work and emulation.
Suppose you endow a charity, or university. You could put your name on it, but you could also endow it in honor of some teacher you had. People differ. There are people who prefer to be anonymous in their giving, or to put somebody else's name on it.
To be sure Plato did not favor 'affirmative action' to fill political and military offices in his own society; nor did he enroll women in his school.
Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness.
I don't want to talk about the regulation of financial markets because that is not my sphere of expertise. It's a very complicated topic, and if I have written a number of books they are always on topics that I think I know something about.
When we feel helpless later in life, fear makes us scapegoat others. Instead of fixing the problems, we say, 'Oh, it's all their fault - those women or immigrants are infesting our country.' Rather than useful protest or constructive solutions, we get angry at these handy targets.
Martin Luther King and Gandhi were not people who failed in self-respect. They were people of hope and great courage, and their courage was disciplined.
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered.
Well, I'm trained as a classicist, so I like to read the Greeks and Romans.
Fear requires belief that you will be harmed, and it is easily manipulated by rhetoric.
Fear is ubiquitous in human life. It starts in infancy with our primal state of helplessness, where we can see what's going on but we can't move to get it. As we grow older we become a little more able to get what we want but then we're going to die so that gives fear another boost.
We have fear as soon as we are born, we are born into a state of physical helplessness.
Hilary Putnam died of cancer at the age of 89. Those of us who had the good fortune to know Putnam as mentees, colleagues, and friends remember his life with profound gratitude and love, since Hilary was not only a great philosopher, but also a human being of extraordinary generosity, who really wanted people to be themselves, not his acolytes.
I love fashion, and I simply enjoy good design in clothes and regard that as one of my hobbies.
If you look into the religions, they have this deep idea of human dignity and the source of dignity being conscience.
It's a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it.
Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger.
There's nothing illogical, it seems to me, about saying, 'I am going to care deeply about my work and my writing. I'm also going to care deeply about my family and my child.'
Every time I undress in the locker room of my gym, I see women bearing the scars of liposuction, tummy tucks, breast implants.
I'm very upset that the Supreme Court ruled that citizens don't have standing to challenge the faith based initiatives on constitutional grounds.
