Could the demands of kinship perhaps be, quite generally, harmonized with those of the body?

If knowledge is the end-all and be-all, then we should expect the activity that is directed at knowledge—philosophical inquiry—to be how a person develops courage, justice, moderation, and so on.

are being blown back and forth between an impulse whose best available rational articulation takes a calculative form, and an impulse whose best available rational articulation takes a legalistic form.

When I have a belief, I don’t have the ability to separately evaluate the truth of that belief.

The truth is that parental instruction is almost always corrective rather than primordial.* You wouldn’t give a two-year-old a lecture about homework; you would give the lecture to a ten-year-old, precisely when she refuses to do it. The sign that a child is ready to hear your instruction is that she is acting in conflict with it.

Taking life fifteen minutes at a time is a Tolstoyan strategy. The name for the opposite strategy is “Socratic.”

they are trying to get the “equality point” set high,

The most radical feature of Socrates is not his godlike hidden wisdom but the naked vulnerability he displayed in treating others as sources of answers to his questions. That is, for Socrates, what one human being is to another: either a source of answers to your questions, or a source of questions that challenge your answers. Socrates explicitly

Meno’s paradox. It calls into question the very possibility of searching: either the search is unnecessary, because you already have what you’re looking for, or it is impossible, because you don’t know what you’re looking for, and so wouldn’t know it if you found it.