Baggini, Julian. _The Edge of Reason: A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World_. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. # Progressive Summary Baggini finds a useful role for Reason, even though all the current vogue is to bash it. He attempts to "bring as many people as possible together into a single ‘community of reason’ in order to protect and strengthen the domain of public reason." He does this by defending a more modest version of rationality than the one which Plato inspired. # Key Points Today, reason is a "debased currency". Philosophically, it is hard to define. We need to come up with a definition of reason that is "thin" enough to be accepted by many individuals and cultures, and "thick" enough to offer some help in thinking through issues. Baggini defends reason by taking a sceptical approach: "The greatest skeptics about reason should be those who seek to defend it." He takes aim at four myths about rationality that can be traced back to Plato: - Reason is purely objective and requires no subjective judgement. - It can and should take the role of our chief guide, the charioteer of the soul. - It can furnish us with fundamental reasons for action. - We can build society on perfectly rational principles. ## Foundationalist vs Coherentism Subtle arguments never carry the day. It's usually the big arguments that hold sway. This is the "end of the day" test. Ask people why they believe what they do "at the end of the day", and they will rarely say "a journal paper". It comes down to cognitive frugality. Given the many important reasons we have for holding our beliefs, to consider "clever counter-arguments would appear to be a bad use of limited intellectual resources." If we were more honest about our beliefs, many of us would admit that it comes down to a feeling of "obviousness". It is obvious to a believer of god that they can feel god's presence. It is similarly obvious to an atheist that all the evidence points to god as a human construct. Believers and non-believers may agree on the procedures of reason (consistency and non-contradiction), but fundamentally disagree on the premises they rest on as the bedrock. Alvin Plantinga, a Christian philosopher, came up with the notion of "properly basic" beliefs. He argued that since justification of beliefs has to stop somewhere, there are some beliefs which are basic or foundational. He argued that belief in god is one of them, and therefore one did not need to rationally justify the existence of god. This is why agreement is so hard to come by: > This room for variety in our properly basic beliefs is what explains the vanishing unlikelihood, if not actual impossibility, of any philosophical dispute about religious belief leading to a decisive victory for one side. Where the conflict really lies is right down at the very bases of why people believe what they do, yet the war is fought over the beliefs that flow from them. It’s like trying to get rid of Japanese knotweed by hacking at the stems when the root system is too deep, capable of regenerating itself even when viciously cut. Philosophers have pretty sharp scythes in the form of arguments and generally speaking they wield them well. But all they do is provide space for new weeds to grow again before they too are cut down to size and the whole cycle starts again. The notion of "basic beliefs" supports a bottom-up, foundationalist approach to rationality. This is usually associated with Descartes, who said that he wanted to ‘demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last’. > [Foundationalism] has its diametric contrast in a coherentism that dispenses with any appeal to basic, foundational truths of fact, categorically rejecting the view that knowledge of the actual, and even of the probable, requires a foundation of certainty. For the coherentist, knowledge is not a Baconian brick wall, with block supporting block upon a solid foundation; but rather a spider’s web in which each item of knowledge is a node linked to others by thin strands of evidential connection, each alone weak, but together collectively adequate to create a strong structure. - Rescher, Nicholas. (2001), Philosophical Reasoning: A Study in the Methodology of Philosophising. Oxford: Blackwell. Using the web analogy, Baggini reconciles coherentism with foundationalism by arguing that some nodes or threads of the web are more important than others. The law of non-contradiction would be one of these. # Resonances # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes ## Introduction > In the popular imagination, reason has ceased to be a universally admired faculty and is portrayed as the enemy of mystery and ambiguity, a cold tool of desiccating logic. It is seen as standing in opposition to emotion, denying the role of feeling and sentiment in daily life. Rationality is dismissed as a tool of hegemonic oppression, a patriarchal construct, a Western imposition or a mistaken privileging of one hemisphere of the brain over the other. The Enlightenment is no longer almost universally revered but often condemned as the birth of the age of dehumanising industrial capitalism, the start of the road that led to Auschwitz. > The rehabilitation of reason is urgent because it is only through the proper use of reason that we can find our way out of the quagmires in which many big issues of our time have become stuck. Without a clear sense of what it means for one point of view to be more reasonable than another, it seems that the position one adopts is ultimately based on nothing more than personal opinion or preference. ## Imported from Readwise: ![[Reference Notes/Highlights/Books/The Edge of Reason#Highlights]]