Chapter 4 shows how internalized stigma often results in adaptive preferences that harm a person. When people incorporate aspects of negative stereotypes into their identity, they sometimes develop adaptive preferences by internalizing harmful social norms and beliefs embedded within these stereotypes. I show how people with mental illness often develop goals and desires that are shaped by these beliefs and social norms, which limits what they believe they are capable of, thus reducing their options for action and truncating their agency and autonomy. While adapting desires to one’s circumstances can be positive, as in positive adaptation, it is negative when it is harmful to a person. The adaptive preferences that result from this can be seen as rationality deficits that are oppressive and nonautonomous and that damage well-being and flourishing.

The ‘framing’ goods of life, sociality and rationality constitute necessary formal conditions of all the other, namely non-formal, goods. They are also intrinsically good; indeed, without any one of them, one ceases to be a human altogether. Life has absolute priority as a framing good, and is distinct from health (since one can be living and ill). After canvassing Aquinas’s and Finnis’s justification of life as a basic good, I offer my own bipartite justification in terms of life as both a ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ human function. As to sociality, humans are essentially animals who live-in-relation, in the rich sense of developing various intentional relations to the world. If they fail to develop these, they become disabled (disability being a dysfunction and hence natural bad). I then detail various forms of sociality (which Aristotle calls philia, often translated ‘friendship’), along with the perfections or goods they embody. Last, I broach the framing good of rationality. This should be understood not as a virtue (either practical or theoretical), but rather as the ‘immanent character of human being and its form or mode of living-in-relation’. I explore its content in detail in Chapter 7.

The term post-truth refers to circumstances in which objective facts exert less influence on public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. While not new, this phenomenon has intensified with the rapid speed that misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread online, compounded by rising political polarization. This book draws on leading research in psychology and other social sciences to explain how post-truth claims emerge, why they persist despite contrary evidence, and how we might respond to their challenges. My analysis integrates three distinct approaches to human reasoning: Bayesian models, dual-process theories, and social argumentation. I introduce the term wise deliberative spaces to describe forums that pursue truth and the common good through discourse practices that foster deliberative dialogue. These spaces have declined in recent decades due to reduced face-to-face community engagement, shifts in the media landscape, declining trust in knowledge-producing institutions, and deepening political divides. The chapter concludes by summarizing the book’s organization.

Both of the two main Hellenistic philosophical schools, the Epicureans and the Stoics, can be said to have an explicit theory of concepts that is broadly speaking empiricist. For both of them assume that all concepts originate in experience and that none are innate. But while their respective accounts appear similar, they arise from contrasting worldviews: atomist materialism for the Epicureans, and corporealism and a belief in providence and the all-pervading logos of God for the Stoics. Our chapter aims to piece together these two accounts of concepts and interpret them afresh. We will explore their commonalities and differences, show how they are impacted by the respective philosophical frameworks to which each of them belongs, and highlight their philosophical value.

The rights of the insane, it is usually assumed, were not a prominent concern in early modern Europe, and they have rarely attracted the attention of scholars. However, the social and legal significance of mental disease in various times and places is well known, so it should be no surprise to find that the persons of the insane, and their attendant capacities, obligations and rights, were matters of substance in early modern jurisprudence. This essay shows how in this era the European legal understanding of insanity developed, and how the insane were deprived of many of their rights; but also how some of these were preserved. In the first part, I outline the conceptions of insanity, derived from Roman civil law, that were applied by jurists. We shall see that there were broadly two ways of thinking about madness in legal contexts. The first, which had wide acceptance from antiquity to the sixteenth century, treated all kinds of insanity as legally equivalent forms of irrationality.

The manipulation of risk and uncertainty by decision makers who are more or less rational and are experiencing more or less fear offers a first cut of the crisis (section 1). A second cut enriches the individual-level analysis by attending to organizational malfunctioning as a potential cause of inadvertent nuclear war. In this analysis political agency is widely dispersed across many layers of the American and Russian militaries (section 2). A symposium on nuclear politics refers briefly to “very innovative” work on nuclear issues without engaging with work in science and technology studies (STS) (section 3). Exemplifying large world thinking, it does away with dualities such as rational and irrational, politics and technology, risk and uncertainty. It integrates human agency, organizational functioning and malfunctioning, and politics across all levels. And embedding the observer fully in a world that does not exist “out there,” it acknowledges the importance of the risk-uncertainty conundrum. In the politics of the crisis, its meaning for different actors, and its effect on shaping the complementarity of risk and uncertainty language matters hugely (section 4). The analysis of nuclear politics has shaped profoundly a widely accepted rational model of war (section 5). And the conclusion illustrates the evolution of a crazy nuclear politics (section 6).

The concern of this chapter is with varieties of philosophical humanism and their own conceptions of the nature and significance of science. After an initial characterization of major themes in Renaissance humanism, it describes three main varieties that are evident in twentieth-century European philosophy – humanism as essentialism, humanism as rational subjectivity, and existential humanism. Different varieties of humanism are associated with different conceptions of science, some allied to the sciences, others antipathetic to them, while yet others offer subtler positions. The upshot is that there are different tales to tell about the relationship of (varieties of) philosophical humanism to (conceptions of) science, only some of which fit popular modern celebratory claims about a necessary alliance of humanism and science. If we take a wider look at the history of philosophy, we find ongoing experimentation with forms of humanism and explorations of diverse ways of understanding and evaluating scientific knowledge and ambitions. What we find is what we ought to expect of social, creative, epistemically sophisticated, self-expressive creatures: endless variety.

Chapter 7 offers a culminating test for competing rationalities, given how thoroughly Julian’s and Cyril’s texts are focused on re-narrating episodes from their rival. It returns to three specific arguments to consider if MacIntyre’s further claim about incommensurable forms of reasoning obtains in Julian’s and Cyril’s engagement. Three case studies in rationality, focusing on words (genētos, pronoia, and pistis) used by Julian and Cyril at crucial points in their reasoning, provide occasion to query whether non-intersecting forms of reasoning are at play in these specific arguments. Intellectual impasses on particular topics can suggest, after all, that the traditions inhabited by individuals engaged in intellectual conflict are more broadly incommensurable.