In Defense of Reason after Hegel builds upon and enlists the arguments of Hegel to refute the disempowerment of reason perpetrated by the peddlers of misinformation in public life and by analytic philosophy and postmodernism in the academy. Undermining their assaults on truth, this book shows how the fundamental character of nature and of mind allow reason to be autonomous and allow us to enact a reality of freedom in accord with right and freely create works of fine art.

The book examines how life and language provide the means for reason to be autonomous and how the autonomy of thought precludes natural evolution or bioengineering from enhancing our capacity for philosophical thinking. It unravels the perplexities of the logic of self-determination and to show how the will can achieve self-determination in the conventions by which agents engender the institutions of freedom. The book then unveils the limitations of the principle of contradiction, which bars the way to an understanding of how anything can be determinate and how thought and action can be free. The book also draws upon Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind to show how language can originate and be an appropriate vehicle of autonomous reason.