
- 228 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
What are reason and rationality? How significant are recent postmodernist and neuroscientific challenges to these longheld notions? Should we abandon a belief in reason and an adherence to rationality? Or can reason and rationality be reformulated and reframed? And what does politics have to do with how we think about reason and why we act more or less rationally?
The Politics of Rationality differs from other books with "reason" or "rationality" due to its historical, political, depth-psychological, and multidisciplinary approach to understanding reason through history.
Charles P. Webel eloquently clarifies the links among ideas, their creators, the relevant mental processes, and the political cultures within which such important concepts as reasons and rationality take hold. He demonstrates how reason and rationality/irrationality have become what they mean for us today and proposes a way to rethink reason and rationality in light of the withering critiques leveled against them. In doing so, he presents a "history of reason and rationality" by examining the intellectual and political contexts of four representative theorists of reason and rationality-- Plato, Machiavelli, Kant, and Weber—and by addressing contemporary challenges posed by postmodernism, depth psychology, and neurophilosophy.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction: Reason within Occidental History
- 1 From the Deed to the Word: Reason and Rationality in the Discourse of Ancient Occidental Intellectuals, Especially Plato
- 2 From the State of Reason to Raison d’État: Machiavelli and the Historicity of All Ideals
- 3 Kant: The Architectonic of Reason
- 4 Max Weber: The Disenchantment of Reason with the Domination of Rationality
- Conclusion: History within Reason, or a World without Reason?
- Index