Quotes by Julian Baggini

“That is why there can be no one account that is ‘the truth’, not because ‘truth’ is beyond us. We need to distinguish between an account which is ‘the truth’ and one which is ‘truthful’. If by ‘the...”

“Many are now skeptical of Freud’s theory – and of psychoanalysis in general – but the broad idea that the unconscious is in the driving seat has become widely accepted and has been given empirical ...”

“Philosophers understandably focus on the nature of reason itself. However, in order for reason to flourish, it needs to be practised in the right environment. And that is sadly often lacking in the...”

“As I suggested at the opening of this part of the book, to avoid hubris we ought to think of this beast as more like a mule than a thoroughbred. Our rationality is a somewhat messy thing that canno...”

“Think of any serious participant in intellectual life. Is there any who does not try to be as comprehensible as is possible? Many are so incomprehensible that we doubt them, but this is almost alwa...”

“This point is critical. Reason is often assumed to be by definition disinterested. Disinterested reason has its place, of course, in mathematics and science, but sometimes it can legitimately be ve...”

“This point is, in essence, the most important and overlooked one regarding the rationality of ethics. The traditional dispute between Kantians and sentimentalists rests on an assumption that to be ...”

“To answer this requires knowledge of ‘child development, healthy emotional lives, healthy cognition and what is going to equip children to become high-functioning adults’, and ‘there are scientific...”

“I think intellectual honesty demands that philosophers accept this all-pervading normativity more openly. Apart from anything else, this helps explain why philosophy matters. We are not just disput...”

“In this way we can see that political reason is as much – if not more – bottom-up than top-down. Rationality requires attending to objective reasons for belief and many of the most important such r...”

“To be truly rational we need to acknowledge the limits of our rationality: nothing is more irrational than an unwarranted faith in reason.”

“There is an irony here. On the one hand, all of these mistakes point to hubris, a belief that human reason is more powerful than it really is. But on the other, all these mistakes implicitly acknow...”

“Disenchantment with politics is therefore toxic, and populism can only increase such disenchantment, since it leads to the promise of simple solutions that cannot be delivered, while removing from ...”

“Even if we are pessimistic about the chances of changing our political culture to make it more reasoned, we have little choice but to try. In politics, the waters beneath the thin ice of reason are...”

“Some may be surprised to have found that my defence of reason has been so eager to point out its limitations. With friends like me, you might wonder if reason needs enemies. But reason needs this k...”

“Our obsession with our differences has created the impression that there is no common domain of rationality within which disagreements can be thrashed out. We just have a multiplicity of discourses...”