Sartre shows us something of Inez's "masculine" nature by having her resort, again and again, to hard-nosed rationality.
He credits Rand's brand of antigovernment libertarianism, hard-nosed rationality and unapologetic self-interest with helping him realize his own American dream — an achievement he sells to the students at his schools.
If rationality, hard work and self-interest are fundamental Randian values, so is the pursuit of happiness.
Ms. Weisz, who in 2006 won an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her role in "The Constant Gardener," describes herself as "extremely passionate about what I do" and initially found Hypatia's cool rationality hard to fathom.
At the beginning of the last century Max Weber wrote about the disenchantment of the world and the encroachment of an iron cage – or, in a more correct translation, hard steel casing – of rationality – a Stahlhartes Gehäuse.
Instead, he argues, monthly payments have imposed strict, externally reinforced disciplines on consumers, making the culture of consumption less a playground for hedonists than an extension of what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of disciplined rationality and hard work.
Rationality is hard to maintain in an irrational world, but, as Alice found on the other side of the mirror, it is mostly worth the effort — and the surest sign of rationality is the ability to imagine that your view might indeed be the backward, mirror-image one.
It is hard to see that rationality requires agents to attempt to remove such inconsistencies in their belief systems; indeed for most it would be both hopeless and counterproductive.
However, this response misses the mark if the prior distribution expresses ignorance rather than opinion: it seems harder to defend the rationality of differences of opinion that stem from different ways of spelling out ignorance.
It's hard to say with any rationality that Steven Spielberg has really gone anywhere; after all, this is a man who is the producer behind what will be three of this summer's biggest films in "Super 8," "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," and "Cowboys & Aliens".
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: I think you're right that the conversation is taking place at such a ridiculous level that it's very hard to steer the discussion toward rationality.
