This introduction outlines the approach and argument of the book, summarising the content of all chapters. The main claim is that knowing can generally be defined as a correct way of doing. The approach is neopragmatist and anti-representational, building on the philosophies of Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom, with the classical pragmatists – Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey – forming the general background. The book’s most original contribution is methodologism, a position in which knowing and meaning require following the ‘method’ or way that attributes warrant to what is known and meaning to what is meant. The ‘method’ of methodologism refers to the etymological meaning of ‘method’ as a way. This way must be correct, where correctness is determined by the rules of practice in a community. There are two general goals for our ‘methods’: (1) The most fundamental aim is to settle our beliefs, and (2) in the absence of a settlement (or the possibility of achieving a settlement in practice), to guide our conversational practice.

In Chapter 1, I introduce and scrutinise the conception of hope that dominates contemporary philosophy: that of a desire for a future outcome held in conditions of epistemic uncertainty. I argue that – despite their ostensible technical disagreements – analytic philosophers are committed to a shared framework that generates an ultimately depoliticised understanding of hope. Through discussion of Adrienne Martin’s How We Hope, and other relevant works, I show that contemporary philosophy understands hope as an everyday psychological phenomenon and an amoral/non-normative concept with merely contingent value. I suggest that the dominant philosophical understanding is incapable of distinguishing between hope and optimism. It therefore cannot acknowledge that the experience of hope can be sparked by commitment to the mere possibility of a specific future rather than the predictive calculation of forecastable outcomes. I discuss the theological account developed by Gabriel Marcel – as well as the political experience of Nelson Mandela – to indicate the importance of understanding hope in terms of the merely possible rather than probable.

This chapter explores the concept of rationality, examining the relationship between human beings and rationality through Brandom’s distinction between ‘sapients’ and ‘sentients’. Brandom treats rationality as a specifically human capacity. However, it is argued that if a non-human agent acquires sufficient discursive competence, it can also be regarded as a rational actor.Next, various senses of rationality are charted. On the one hand, rationality appears as inferential competence universally possessed by all genuinely discursive agents. On the other hand, it manifests as a variable form of social practice, shaped by material rather than formal features.The chapter concludes by proposing a conception of rationality as discursive rationality, composed of three core features: (1) a tight, dense, and explicit inferential structure; (2) a systematic coping mechanism with the non-linguistic world; and (3) openness to alternative inferential structures. This leads to a maxim for communal and discursive rationality: the more a community exhibits these three features, the more rational it is.

Stoic psychology is distinctive in the ancient tradition: it takes the mentality of a mature human being to be rational through and through, rejecting Platonic and Aristotelian commitments to distinct rational and non-rational parts of the soul. Critics who assume the implausibility of psychological monism typically fail to track the distinction between (a) what is rational in the sense of requiring the resources of a rational mind (rational-1) and (b) what is rational in the sense of meeting a normative standard of rationality (rational-2). The chapter isolates a common core to Stoic and Kantian conceptions of what it is to be rational-1 as the basis for interpreting Kant as a psychological monist. This interpretation is elaborated through the demonstration of its compatibility with Kant’s threefold faculty psychology. Kantian psychological monism is rooted in a claim about apperceptive self-consciousness as the fundamental resource of a rational-1 mind, and which transforms the powers of cognition, desire, and feeling in us. The final section examines Kant’s explicit endorsement of Stoic apathy as evidence of his clear-sighted appropriation of elements of Stoic psychology.

This chapter offers an account of the concept of technē in classical Greek culture, with particular attention to its social, epistemological, and pedagogical dimensions. It draws on literary, documentary, and art historical sources to reconstruct technē as a lifelong, economically embedded profession characterized by specialization, teachability, and use of rationality. Four core aspects are emphasized: (1) the low social status of dēmiourgoi; (2) the close relationship between technē and teaching, including apprenticeship; (3) the necessity of specialization, with practitioners typically mastering only one trade; and (4) the rationality of technē, evidenced through causal reasoning, written protocols, and the use of mathematics. The chapter also explores the contested status of elite practices – such as warfare, poetry, and rhetoric – as technai, and the sophists’ self-presentation as professionals. By situating technē within the lived realities of ancient Greek labor and education, the chapter sets the stage for Plato’s philosophical use of the concept.

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.