He thinks the best defense of reason is a common practical and ethical commitment.
The world needs our steadfastness in the defense of reason against fanaticism; in the struggle for health against epidemic disease; in the containment of nuclear threats to peace.
By speaking in this manner, the sage acknowledges the supremacy of the divine order in all of its senses, but he does this now in defense of reason and rationality.
His major critical works, Primitivism and Decadence, Maule's Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense, were collected as In Defense of Reason (1947; rev. ed., 1960).
In the case of my maximizing of the welfare of the blue-eyed, we do ask for a justification; we do not take "because they're blue-eyed" as an adequate defense of a reason to give to the blue-eyed.
Hence, while many writers have come to the defense of external reasons by appealing to a disposition to be motivated by beliefs about reasons, if this interpretation is correct then Williams' argument is directly aimed against this kind of solution.
It is a closely reasoned, deductively argued defense of the rationality of inductive inference, well meriting continued attention.
The rise of fascism in Italy, compounded by the Great Depression of the 1930s, darkened the interval between the wars from which, at Naples, the philosopher Benedetto Croce and other enlightened figures stand forth in defense of humanity and reason.
An efficient yet elegant gloss on "The Seven Samurai" and "The Wild Bunch," it stars Mr. Yakusho as the leader of a group of samurai assigned to kill a psychopathic warlord, wielding his sword in defense of honor and reason.
For the dogmatists, conversely, Kant's supposed defense of the powers of reason ceded far too much ground to the antimetaphysical camp.
On their view, Kant's defense of the autonomy of reason takes place within a project of identifying the foundation of morality, which is realist in spirit because it appeals to the absolute value of humanity (Wood 1999, 157, 114; Rauscher 2002; Langton 2007; Johnson 2007; Hills 2008; Besch 2008, 2009; Krasnoff 1999; Kain 1999, 2004, 2006b; Larmore 2008, 83 84; Irwin 2009; Galvin 2010).
