The Limits Of Reason

This exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves. “A must-read for anyone studying information science.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own intuitions about the world—including our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve: • perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense • different levels of infinity • the bizarre world of the quantum • the relevance of relativity theory • the causes of chaos theory • math problems that cannot be solved by normal means • statements that are true but cannot be proven Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.

This provocative, lucidly written reconstruction of utilitarianism focuses on the practical constraints involved in ethical choice: information may be inadequate, and understanding of causes and effects may be limited. Good decision making may be especially constrained if other people are closely involved in determining an outcome. Hardin demonstrates that many of these structural issues can and should be distinguished from the thornier problems of utilitarian value theory, and he is able to show what kinds of moral conclusions we can reach within the limits of reason.

Law and the Limits of Reason asks "what are the consequences of recognizing the limits of reason within the legal system?" In particular, what are the consequences for the allocation of lawmaking authority among judges, legislators, and administrative agencies or executive officials? Vermeule examines the conditions under which the limits of reason support a greater or lesser allocation of authority to one institution or another.

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a key element of the system of philosophy which Kant introduced with his Critique of Pure Reason, and a work of major importance in the history of Western religious thought. It represents a great philosopher's attempt to spell out the form and content of a type of religion that would be grounded in moral reason and would meet the needs of ethical life. It includes sharply critical and boldly constructive discussions on topics not often treated by philosophers, including such traditional theological concepts as original sin and the salvation or 'justification' of a sinner, and the idea of the proper role of a church. This volume presents it and three short essays that illuminate it in new translations by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, with an introduction by Robert Merrihew Adams that locates it in its historical and philosophical context.

In recent decades, a growing body of educational scholarship has called into question deeply embedded assumptions about the nature, value and consequences of reason. Education and the Limits of Reason extends this critical conversation, arguing that in seeking to investigate the meaning and significance of reason in human lives, sources other than non-fiction educational or philosophical texts can be helpful. Drawing on the work of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov, the authors demonstrate that literature can allow us to see how reason is understood and expressed, contested and compromised – by distinctive individuals, under particular circumstances, in complex and varied relations with others. Novels, plays and short stories can take us into the workings of a rational or irrational mind and show how the inner world of cognitive activity is shaped by external events. Perhaps most importantly, literature can prompt us to ask searching questions of ourselves; it can unsettle and disturb, and in so doing can make an important contribution to our educational formation. An original and thought provoking work, Education and the Limits of Reason offers a fresh perspective on classic texts by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov, and encourages readers to reconsider conventional views of teaching and learning. This book will appeal to a wide range of academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, literature and philosophy.

The emotions pose many philosophical questions. We don't choose them; they come over us spontaneously. Sometimes emotions seem to get it wrong: we experience wrongdoing but do not feel anger, feel fear but recognise there is no danger. Yet often we expect emotions to be reasonable, intelligible and appropriate responses to certain situations. How do we explain these apparent contradictions? Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason presents a bold new picture of the emotions that challenges prevailing philosophical orthodoxy. Talia Morag argues that too much emphasis has been placed on the "reasonableness" of emotions and far too little on two neglected areas: the imagination and the unconscious. She uses these to propose a new philosophical and psychoanalytic conception of the emotions that challenges the perceived rationality of emotions; views the emotions as fundamental to determining one's self-image; and bases therapy on the ability to "listen" to one’s emotional episode as it occurs. Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason is one of the first books to connect philosophical research on the emotions to psychoanalysis. It will be essential reading for those studying ethics, the emotions, moral psychology and philosophy of psychology as well as those interested in psychoanalysis.

Traditionally understood as pre-critical, even pre-rational, mythical thought has in fact played a critical role in post-Enlightenment intellectual history. Modernists in philosophy and literature have used the depictive rationality of myth to disclose, in self-reflective ways, the limits of discursive sense-making in various domains of human experience. In so doing, they have effectively furthered, without resort to analytical abstractions, the epistemological critique of reason begun during the Enlightenment. Stambovsky illustrates four widely diverse examples of this critical form of mythical thinking in works by Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Henry James, and Margaret Atwood. The selected texts focus respectively on religious, national-cultural, psychosocial, and psychobiological realms of experience. These illustrations follow an inquiry into why the very possibility of critical, mythically inventive (mythopoetic) reflection is unsatisfactorily explained by leading rationalist accounts of myth. It is with this problem in mind that Stambovsky begins his monograph with observations on the origins of rationalist and counter-rationalist conceptualizations of myth in the fragments of Xenophanes (the father of rationalist mythology) and in Plato's Phaedrus. Of pivotal import is the early rationalist discrimination of mythos from logos and its epistemological implications (the rationalist legacy) in the history of the idea of myth. Following his look at paradigmatic classical precedents, Stambovsky traces the influence of the rationalist legacy in the myth theory of Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Cassirer, Ricoeur, and Blumenberg. The aim is to reveal how this influence in different ways limits these theories as instruments for detecting and explaining the seminal critical and historical significance of modern mythopoeia. This study will be of particular interest to teachers and students of myth theory in departments of philosophy, religion, literature, and cultural anthropology.

Graham Priest presents an expanded edition of his exploration of the nature and limits of thought. Embracing contradiction and challenging traditional logic, he engages with issues across philosophical borders, from the historical to the modern, Eastern to Western, continental to analytic.