Sublime

Colleges generally ask a person distinguished by fantastic career success to give a speech in which they claim that career success is not that important.

Open-mindedness is paradoxical because it requires a person to be willing to admit that she is wrong—which,

I were to treat a question as a proper question, rather than a problem in disguise—which is to say, to ask that question purely for the sake of answering it—could I tell when I had in fact arrived at the answer? This is called “Meno’s paradox,”

you face up to the difficulty of understanding what it means to truly think critically, the result is a much more demanding “Socratic method” than the one to which we are accustomed. In part three, we examine that method’s demands in the three areas of human life where Socrates thought our ignorance loomed largest: politics, love, and death.

In this view, the reason we can’t live our lives Socratically is that Socrates,

Does a just society seek to promote the virtue of its citizens? Or should law be neutral toward competing conceptions of virtue, so that citizens can be free to choose for themselves the best way to live?

Socrates’ solution is to give one person the task of asserting truths, and the other person the job of avoiding falsehoods. If they work together, the second refuting the first, they can achieve both goals.

think I understand justice, though I don’t in fact understand it.

“Think of those who, not by fault of inconsistency but by lack of effort, are too unstable to live as they wish, but only live as they have begun.” —SENECA, ON TRANQUILITY OF MIND