Sublime

For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.

Several years ago the students of Stanford voted him the best teacher on the faculty, which must have enraged his colleagues because you cannot maintain proper status in an American university without cultivated mediocrity. You must be academically “sound,” which is to be preposterously and phenomenally dull. Once I had a professor who was teaching

One of Dewey’s principal concerns was for the relationship between education and democracy. He made the point that democracy is not just a form of government—it is, rather, ‘a mode of associated living, a conjoint communicated experience’ (1916: 101). A good society was for Dewey an open society where people related on equal terms and all benefited

Philosophy is spiritual formation, care of the soul.

The disordered love of learning makes you a mere technician of information for some end other than wisdom, and the irony is that philosophy could devolve into just another way of idolizing.

First ethics, then politics—this is the order of ideas to us; the reverse is the order of history.