"Absurdity, most generally, consists in a disparity between our expectations or pretentions and reality."

"Trust has value in itself because it is an expression of our agency, even of what we might call our personhood."

"I want to be able to condemn the structural conditions of my exploitation without condemning the person I ended up becoming as a result."

"if philosophical pessimism is to be seen as something more than a 'mere' temperament or attitude, what might this be?"

"We can perhaps summarise the philosophical problem of contemporary punishment outlined above as: it doesn’t work, and yet we need it."

"Home is our anchor point within reality which gives us orientation and allows us to set out in new directions."

"The emphasis on immediate economic returns overlooks the long-term societal benefits of a populace well-versed in philosophical reasoning"

"The dialectical link between our scholarly and civic activities implies that the future of public philosophy lies in the universities."

"Do we accept our servitude, recognizing that all attempts to overcome it end in futility, or seek to abolish it in an act of self-erasure?"

"What makes someone especially good at philosophy, argues Midgley, is a kind of perceptiveness, a power to distinguish what really matters."

"By questioning the default story form, we question the default views on what kinds of lives we’ve been trained to find satisfying."

"The admiration that effortlessness invokes comes from a skill that lies beyond skill, which is achieved through mental emptiness."

"If academics want to increase uptake and funding, it seems plausible to suggest they must do something that is publicly interesting."

"Arguably, the function of the modern concept of race was to rationalize forms of oppression and subjugation like chattel slavery."

"The ethos of Silicon Valley is often described as ‘libertarian’, but it isn’t. It is deeply authoritarian."

"What does it mean to think with others even if, or particularly when, our living conditions may not be conducive to thought?"

"To live in hopeless times is not only subjectively to feel hopeless. It is for that feeling in a real way to reflect the way things are."

"Philosophy, including and perhaps especially, public philosophy, is often best done in dialogue, as Socrates well knew."

"Epistemic vices are fundamentally failures of our inner life, failures to relate or respond to epistemic values and ideals."

"The Platonic/Cartesian formulation captures an abiding element of human experience; the body can be a prison from which we long to be free"