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" No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can't decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you've made in your life to date. "

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" The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place. "

Julian Baggini

Questioning

You

Doubt

" Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality. "

" True humility is expressed in deeds, not words. The humble are those who truly walk the same ground as everyone else - not necessarily with grovelling, hunched backs, but certainly not lording it over others, either. "

" Being a good neighbour is about compassion, which is as warm-blooded as justice is cool-headed. "

" The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives. "

" You should protest about the views of people you disagree with over major moral issues, and argue them down, but you should not try to silence them, however repugnant you find them. That is the bitter pill free speech requires us to swallow. "

" Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test. "

" The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why, when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up. "

" Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural. "

" I don't think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive. "

" Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway. "

" Christmas is a rare occasion when we are reminded that we have obligations to people we did not choose to be related to, and that love is not just a spontaneous feeling but something we sometimes really have to work at, with people we may not even much like. "

" It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient. "

" On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data. "

" The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success. "

" To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel. "

Julian Baggini

World

Live

" If we now find ourselves looking down on the cheap and convenient, it is only because we now have better things which are affordable. "

" Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too. "

" We can take suffering to be an opportunity to learn and to grow. But if we are honest, we should remember that this is making the best of a bad job, and that minimising suffering takes priority over optimising its outcome. "

" Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world. "

" When you do the right thing, but not to any particular person, we instinctively feel that we have earned some sort of pay back. Since no-one will do that for us, we opt for self-service reciprocation. "

" Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world. "

" You don't choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe. "

" The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments. "

Julian Baggini

Free

Own

" When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning or changes for the worse. "

" Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else. "

Julian Baggini

Philosophy

Everything

" The idea that the mind can extend even beyond the body is an intriguing one, and is bound to become more pressing as we increasingly develop technologies that augment our natural abilities. "

" Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones. "

" Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you. "

" True respect means taking other people's beliefs seriously and assuming they are adult and intelligent enough to be able to cope with it if you tell them, clearly and civility, why you think they are totally, utterly and disastrously wrong. "