"TO PHILOSOPHIZE IS TO PREPARE TO DIE."

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014) ("Plato shared, with radical modification, 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 exertion in reason that makes us matter--makes us, to the extent that we can be, godlike. And if such exertions don't win the acclaim of the masses, so much the worse for the masses. The kind of extraordinary that matters is likely to go undetected by them--so, in a certain sense, though not in all sense, they really don't matter. This is a harsh statement, but, as already noted, harshness didn't much faze the Greeks, and Plato is no exception here." Id. at 9. "And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less, than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world." Id. at 40. "What is an intellectual but someone who has so disciplined his or her mind that he or she can take extreme pleasure in the free play of ideas?" Id. at 207. Also, see Anthony Gottlieb, "Let's Have A Dialogue," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/20/2014.).