Return to Reason

by Stephen Toulmin

Book Overview

The turmoil and brutality of the twentieth century have made it increasingly difficult to maintain faith in the ability of reason to fashion a stable and peaceful world. After the ravages of global conflict and a Cold War that divided the world's loyalties, how are we to master our doubts and face the twenty-first century with hope? In Return to Reason , Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674012356
• ISBN13: 9780674012356
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 243 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Don't agree with tiglath_iii's review

My experience in reading this book has been opposite of what tiglath_iii describes. The point of this book is almost too clear, given the author's repeated efforts to summarize it clearly (i.e. "there is too much emphasis on reason and not enough consideration of practical and contextual factors in understanding, a situation that has developed in philosophy only since the seventeenth century and has become cemented in our thinking only in the twentieth"). To say "His name dropping is incessant and intrusive" is unfair: Every source discussed is well-introduced, and he seems to deliberately avoid making his argument too academic or too technical. I will grant that the idea could be expressed more concisely, but it seems to me that the point of the book is to show that concise, streamlined argumentation is very often artificially abstracted, and so its conclusions are very often "useful" in a limited sense. It seems to "practice what it preaches," in that sense. One can hardly fault Toulmin for writing in a sometimes meandering, anecdotal style when his subject is the damaging effects of overemphasizing logical argumentation.I have been looking for writers (besides Rorty) who address the growing resistance of philosophers to the suggestions of the those in the humanities (in Toulmin's terms, defending "logic" against the "casuistry of rhetoric"), and Toulmin's book was just what I was looking for. I had trouble putting this book down once I started it, and wanted to read more when I was done.