Rationality

1. In this talk, I would like to focus on the two attitudes that I have towards your project. It is not that I have ambiguous feelings; no, I have two distinct feelings. On the one hand, I am convinced that you will not reach your goal because such a goal is unreachable. Not only that. Your goal is undesirable and best abandoned. On the other hand, if you strive with integrity, clarity and passion …

There are three ideas in the West about Law that are taken as axioms. The first: all societies are founded on Law; if they are not, they ought to be. The second is that Law teaches and educates a people. Third is their corollary: only thus do a people become a Nation. As far as I know, none has shown their empirical truth or proved that they are logically necessary. But their truth-value is …

Consider the question: “why superstition?” Our problem lies in circumscribing this notion itself: is it something we should use to characterize beliefs, or attitudes, or theories or actions or all of them? Our linguistic usage allows it mostly of ‘beliefs’ and to the act of believing: to believe that walking under the ladder brings bad; to believe that vampires exist and walk as ordinary humans in …

If we understand the word ’tradition’ to mean ‘a set of practices’, then the question is this: why continue a set of practices? When someone ‘justifies’ (I will soon explain why I use scare quotes for this) this by referring to the existence of a set of practices, what exactly is the person doing? One way of looking at it is to say that the person ‘justifies’ his actions and understand …

It is in the nature of a rhetorical text that the author uses linguistic ’tropes’ (metaphors, similes, analogies, imagery, etc) to persuade a reader about the reasonableness of a specific standpoint. It does not build arguments that systematically lead to a stand point but instead tries to convince the readers (or listeners) by using the abilities built into natural languages. Such texts do not …