At the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival earlier this year, award-winning English novelist Joanna Kavenna, renowned public intellectual Rory Sutherland, and pioneering philosopher Rebecca Roache met to debate the limits of reason. The three thinkers discussed the ambiguous line between reason, truth, and well-being in a wide-ranging conversation replete with ideas from ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary neuroscience. Charlie Barnett explores the debate and suggests that reason is useless by itself, and in the hands of the wrong person, its application can have disastrous impacts.

Note: ‘Reason’ is used in the Enlightenment sense of analyzing a situation logically and rationally instead of falling back on tradition, dogma and authority. ‘Rationality’ is used interchangeably with ‘reason’ as is often done so in everyday use.