Reason and Rationality

✍ Scribed by Jon Elster, Steven Rendall

Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2008
Tongue: English
Leaves: 86
Category: Library

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

I read this book as an important contribution to the call for a reappropriation of reason and rationality (and philosophy in general) by progressives and communitarians.

The book can get a bit technical, but an important pointer that helped me gain footing is to read it as a critique of the model of rational agency employed by right-wing economists. The right-wing economist begins from the assumption that rationality consists only in the strategies an agent employs to satisfy his subjective preferences, without recognizing her own normative role in applying such a model and in refusing to engage the question of (the objective) reason in the formation of preferences.

The author briefly and gracefully explains the work of Sartre (and by implication most of postmodernist existentialism, poststructuralism, etc) as a self-understood irrational dead-end, an impasse, for progressives and communitarians which can bring no help or critique in addressing the right-wing appropriation of rationality.

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Translated from the French