enlightenment
Podcast #169: Harvard Professor Steven Pinker on Rational Thinking, the Monty Hall Problem, and the Case for Objective Truth
Enlightenment Now author Steven Pinker speaks with Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay about his newly published book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
Be Rational
Rationality is uncool. To describe someone with a slang word for the cerebral, like nerd, wonk, geek, or brainiac, is to imply they are terminally challenged in hipness. For decades, Hollywood screenplays and rock-song lyrics have equated joy and freedom with an escape from reason. “A man needs a little
How Will Decolonizing the Curriculum Help the Poor and Dispossessed?
On February 8th, 2021, the Students of Color Liberation Front at the University of Michigan made a series of anti-racist demands, including a call to “Decolonize the University of Michigan’s pedagogies and campus broadly.” This is a recent manifestation of the “decolonize the university” movement, which has been making
Enlightenment Wars: Some Reflections on 'Enlightenment Now,' One Year Later
You wouldn’t think that a defense of reason, science, and humanism would be particularly controversial in an era in which those ideals would seem to need all the help they can get. But in the words of a colleague, “You’ve made people’s heads explode!” Many people who
Between Discipline and Chaos
“Anyone capable of living outside a city,” wrote Aristotle, “must either be a beast or a god.” Before taking offense or pride in that aphorism, the rural should know that the Greek for “city” here is polis, and the polis of classical Greece was not a city in our sense.
