If copies could be got into governments and development agencies it would be a major step towards a common platform of understanding of pastoral rationality, which is perhaps the most important outcome that can be expected.
While Kantian constructivists build a moral dimension of impartiality into their understanding of reason, Hobbesian contractualists hold a non-moralized conception of rationality understood as the capacity effectively to satisfy one's interests.
The apparent divergence of both enterprises can be reconciled to some extent once one recognizes that both goals relate to a third, and possibly more general problem, namely (3) the problem of understanding the rationality of inquiry.
Philosophers have different understandings of practical rationality.
Likewise, it is unclear whether the dialectic project on which Horkheimer and Adorno embarked is coherent, and whether Adorno, in particular, has a consistent understanding of "nature" and "rationality" (see Eckersley 1992 and Vogel 1996, for a review of the Frankfurt School's thinking about nature).
A certain, soothing fascination accompanies this mechanical absorption in abstraction because it offers illusions of rationality, understanding, and control in a decision-making universe that is very much not about those things.
Sixty years ago, the idea that the federal government might launch a giant program to vaccinate millions of people for their own protection, and not least to protect others from infection seemed the height of rationality, an understanding that the best medicine is preventive medicine.
Sixty years ago, the idea that the federal government might launch a giant program to vaccinate millions of people — for their own protection, and not least to protect others from infection — seemed the height of rationality, an understanding that the best medicine is preventive medicine.
That is, they are concerned with matters of education, and they directly relate positions on education to positions on the nature of human understanding and rationality.
None of them hold the slightest bit of rationality, or even basic understanding of the concept of democracy.
