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    Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason
    Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason
    Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason
    Audiobook13 hours

    Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

    Written by Justin E. H. Smith

    Narrated by Jeff Harding

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A fascinating history that reveals the ways in which the pursuit of rationality often leads to an explosion of irrationality

    It’s a story we can’t stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal.” But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today—from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump—Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite. From sex and music to religion and war, irrationality makes up the greater part of human life and history.

    Rich and ambitious, Irrationality ranges across philosophy, politics, and current events. Challenging conventional thinking about logic, natural reason, dreams, art and science, pseudoscience, the Enlightenment, the internet, jokes and lies, and death, the book shows how history reveals that any triumph of reason is temporary and reversible, and that rational schemes, notably including many from Silicon Valley, often result in their polar opposite. The problem is that the rational gives birth to the irrational and vice versa in an endless cycle, and any effort to permanently set things in order sooner or later ends in an explosion of unreason. Because of this, it is irrational to try to eliminate irrationality. For better or worse, it is an ineradicable feature of life.

    Illuminating unreason at a moment when the world appears to have gone mad again, Irrationality is fascinating, provocative, and timely.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateApr 2, 2019
    ISBN9780691193472
    Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

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    Reviews for Irrationality

    4.5/5

    42 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Amazing ending where the author becomes rational from irrational Amazing.
      The title and the ending makes it worth the journey inbetween.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Yet another pathetic attempt to equate Trump with all those horrible things the liberals want to force down everyone's throat in the name of reason. When will people wake up and see they are being manipulated to hate?

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The most staggeringly well written, most antagonistically balanced (as in poised and self inspecting) stack of pholosphical dirt ever piled while digging a grave.

      It is neatly piled.
      There are even slopes all around.

      The natural and stable gradient is achieved only because the pace of shovelling has perfectly matched the gravity of the subject.

      Simply, life, and everything we can think of, before death.

      It's here in words.

      Perhaps better said, heaped shovel fulls.

      1 person found this helpful