Abstract
The belief that we are able to secure the substance of the world is grounded on yet another, much more substantial and deeply rooted, belief about reason and rationality as the fundamental and distinctive feature of human capacity. The faith in rationality sustains the long-held belief in the sure way to truth and to knowledge. Yet at a very basic and essential level, reason simply means thinking logically for a given purpose. Reason is the tool of the conscious movement, guiding it with rules and principles and producing unity and consistency, but it cannot be the source of new knowledge. New ideas can be synthesized, clarified, or inferred from reason, but cannot originate from reason.
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Notes
- 1.
Jürgen Habermas, “Selections from ‘An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative Versus Subject-Centered Reason,’” in Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, eds. David Ingram and Julia Simon-Ingram (New York: Paragon House, 1992), 279.
- 2.
Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lendardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 57.
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Zhao, G. (2020). On Reason and Rationality. In: Subjectivity and Infinity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45590-3_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45590-3_15
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