Tuesday 6th May - 06:00 PM BST
Headline Debate: The Tyranny of Reason
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'We all want to be reasonable and be seen to be reasonable. Yet reason has been employed to defend everything from white supremacy to the divine right of kings and tyrants. And critics claim it is still used as a rhetorical front for the powerful. So it’s unclear how to use rationality that avoids cloaking interests and prejudices in a veil of respectability. Studies show we use reason to look for evidence to confirm beliefs twice as often as to challenge them. Moreover, experiments show that mathematicians and scientists, those at the forefront of reason, are often just as irrational as everyone else about many beliefs.
Should we conclude that rationality is a marketing exercise to appear convincing? Should we place more emphasis on wisdom, emotion and intuition? Or is reason a key tool in the fight against prejudice and which we abandon at great risk to ourselves and our culture?
Pioneering gender theorist and critic of rationality Judith Butler, leading Stoic philosopher and defender of rationality Massimo Pigliucci, and radical scholar and Enlightenment critic Tommy Curry go head to head in whether reason can ever be separated from prejudice.
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Judith Butler
Pioneering gender theorist
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They are most well-known for their ground-breaking book Gender Trouble (1990) and their theory of performativity.
Tommy J. Curry
Groundbreaking scholar
Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy and holds the Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, which won the 2018 American Book Award. Dr. Curry’s research has been recognized by Diverse as placing him among the Top 15 Emerging Scholars in the United States in 2018, and his public intellectual work earned him the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy’s Alain Locke Award in 2017.
Massimo Pigliucci
Celebrated stoic philosopher
Massimo Pigliucci is a renowned philosopher and professor at the City College of New York. He is author of several books including How to be a Stoic and Beyond Stoicism A former co-host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast and a self-proclaimed sceptic, Pigliucci is a champion of Enlightenment notions of reason and rationality.