Julian Baggini Quotes

That is why there can be no one account that is ‘the truth’, not because ‘truth’ is beyond us. We need to distinguish between an account which is ‘the truth’ and one which is ‘truthful’. If by ‘the truth’ of a life we mean the one, true, complete account of it, then no such truths can be told. But we can tell more or less truthful stories about our lives and those of others: ones that do not gloss over embarrassing facts, ones that reveal many sides of a personality and not just those we wish to promote. Relating such a truthful story is not about cataloguing the largest possible number of true facts about a person. That is why our commitment to truth and rationality requires that our conceptual maps only include genuine features of what we are mapping and do not leave out anything that a user of that map might reasonably be expected to find useful. But the idea that we can come up with any kind of conceptual map that does not reflect our values and interests is a mirage. Philosophical autobiography helps us to see that behind all reasoning is a reasoner who can never drain away all her individuality.

Philosophical autobiographies do much more than simply reveal the personalities and prejudices of their authors, however. They provide striking examples of just why such factors inevitably colour our thinking beyond the biographical.

Really good philosophising requires something more than a razor-sharp brain, something that is sometimes called subtlety of mind, a philosophical sensibility or insight. I call it judgement, which I define somewhat cumbersomely as as a cognitive faculty required to reach conclusions or form theories, the truth or falsity of which cannot be determined by an appeal to facts and/or logic alone. There are numerous examples of this, but perhaps the clearest comes from moral philosophy.

If it seems shocking to some that scientists are not cold computers but human beings with different preferences, dispositions, skills and temperaments then they must have a very strange idea of how people think. Science is indeed a rational pursuit par excellence. But it does violence to the notion of rationality if we pretend that it is not a complicated, somewhat messy capacity.

When you have strong desires to believe something, it is always possible to convince yourself that a decisive argument against one node wasn’t decisive after all, or that you have found a reply to it. Mending and making do can enable one to think a web of belief still holds together, even after a good critic has ripped it to shreds. But the fact that we know reason will not convince everyone is beside the point. Whether an argument is sound or whether it is persuasive are two different questions. It should come as no surprise that good rational arguments often fail to persuade people. The case for reason is not that it is always psychologically efficacious but that it genuinely helps us towards the truth. However, just as you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink, so you can lead a mind to reason but you cannot make it think.

Only our most intimate friends know our deepest flaws, and in the same way the greatest skeptics about reason should be those who seek to defend it. If we do not debunk the grandiose myths of reason then its enemies will do so far more destructively. My positive case for rationality therefore requires taking us through four key myths of rationality, all of which can be traced back to Plato. These myths are: that reason is purely objective and requires no subjective judgement; that it can and should take the role of our chief guide, the charioteer of the soul; that it can furnish us with the fundamental reasons for action; and that we can build society on perfectly rational principles.

The rehabilitation of reason is urgent because it is only through the proper use of reason that we can find our way out of the quagmires in which many big issues of our time have become stuck. Without a clear sense of what it means for one point of view to be more reasonable than another, it seems that the position one adopts is ultimately based on nothing more than personal opinion or preference.

If the house on the lake can become a new iteration of a philosophical retreat, that would pay homage to its first owner much more than any number of selfie-snapping visitors could.