Host David Rubin is convinced that the regressive left is the equivalent of America's Tea Party – dangerous for progressive politics, whose purpose should be to champion reason and debate to achieve greater equality and improve human rights.
Kundera is a man of the Enlightenment, and is not loath to champion reason over emotion, pointing out, as he has frequently done in his essays as well as his fiction, that many of the worst disasters mankind has suffered were spawned by those who attended most passionately to the dictates of the heart.
Many in this massive group already champion reason, defend science, welcome radical technologies, and implicitly trust and embrace modern medicine.
At its end, the ideas of the Enlightenment (which championed reason above tradition) are in retreat, as fundamentalism, ethnic nationalism, the self-assertion of non-western cultures and the failings of western societies render Enlightenment ideologies decreasingly influential.
However, even though experience may serve as a foundation for Wolff, he nonetheless dogmatically champions reason and understanding as the keys to philosophical certainty.
Through his constant engagement with revealed texts to support the importance of reason, Saadya, in the very act of championing reason, can be seen as planting reason on the ground of revelation.
For a sense of Strauss as ultimately championing reason over revelation, see, e.g., Meier 2006 (a reading which Batnitzky describes as concluding that "revelation is in the end for Strauss a straw man"; see Batnitzky 2009, 54).
According to Saadya, humans don't know what God has in mind regarding this class of laws, and yet, champion of reason as Saadya appears to be, he nonetheless decides (albeit tentatively, and with qualification) to provide reasons for these laws.
On Tuesday, as he tried to explain his education plan at Foyles bookshop, in London, the erstwhile champion of reason was shouted down as having "no right to speak", then ushered away as a smoke bomb was let off.
That changed his public image from an architect of Iran's theocracy to a human-rights champion, one reason that hundreds of thousands turned out for his funeral on Dec. 21 despite government restrictions, making it a flashpoint between the protesters and the government.
The stories of these men have acquired a new currency in our unnerving era of incrementally eroded civil rights, yet none can claim the iconic status of Tom Paine, unerring champion of reason in the face of religion and inherited privilege, author of The Rights of Man, and a founding father of the American Republic.
