Stop Being Reasonable: six stories of how we really change our minds

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In telling your wife about the diagnosis, I would, however, make serious effort to help steel her for the possibility of more insults in the future. There are care workers and support groups who can help her deal with the concept-mashed, ragged insults she might have to hear. I’m less worried about his political views than I am about his views on masculinity. His political beliefs are ultimately up to him, and politics are for many people oddly independent of their actual character. But a dismissal of women, or a narrative that men have been made victims of feminist progress – that can be much harder to shift.

Professor of Philosophy Sarah McGrath recalls watching Gordon-Smith deliver “the most effective undergraduate lecture I have ever seen anyone give anywhere, ever, on any topic. I believe that I saw Princeton undergraduate students fall in love with philosophy there before my eyes that morning.” I remember sitting in my first philosophy class and feeling like this was what thinking should really be like. I left knowing less than I thought I did when I arrived – all my other classes were about the legislative agenda around human rights and my philosophy class said wait, what’s a right and what counts as human? I loved the ability to ask those questions and from that day on it’s always felt like that’s where the real action is: the deep questions that we too easily take for granted. Do you specialise in a key area or areas? Inspiring, moving and perceptive,Stop Being Reasonable is a mind-changing exploration of the murky place where philosophy and real life meet. You asked what you should do. You sound strikingly clear about how you feel: you can’t bear it any more, you feel rage, you want her not to come and stay. These don’t sound like the kind of feelings you should be expected to endure indefinitely. And one final note: however you decide to manage this relationship, try not to see it as simply your problem. It’s considerate of your husband not to want to upset his family – but you’re his family too. Your wellbeing needs to count in the inventory of feelings worth protecting.Perhaps you could make room for some of that hurt – how did the (known) infidelities affect her; does she wish she’d done anything differently? You could do so in a way that gently insists it’s a temporary stopping point on the way to letting go, and that you won’t be doing any factual digging. While it’s true that some people find meaning in their career or use it to forge an identity they’re proud of, the fact that’s true for them doesn’t mean it should be for you. You’re not deviant for feeling this way – I’ve said elsewhere that the idea that work has moral value unto itself is a myth we pay for with the one resource we can never replenish: our time. A third-year Ph.D. student in politics, William Wen was recognized for his work as a preceptor in “Introduction to Quantitative Social Science.” “He was always enthusiastic, warm and effortlessly professional with the students and with me,” said Marc Ratkovic, an assistant professor of politics. I'm not sure Stop Being Reasonable tells me a lot about my own situation, though I could no doubt think that through more carefully to get some insights. Either way, it's well-written, accessible, engaging and yet at the same time not at all dumbed down in how it presents its case, drawing on a seamless collection of contemporary and canonical philosophy, popular culture, journalism et al. What its argument boils down to is that conventional rationality is not sufficient (or even adequate) to explain why people change their minds, using a quite varied set of empirical case studies to support the argument. The people concerned have changed their minds in quite dramatic - but not conventionally rational - circumstances. This then has implications for how people can be persuaded to change their minds by others, and therefore it is significant to politics, public education campaigns etc.

Eleanor says: When someone becomes your in-law, you get thrust into quite an intimate relationship. They’re in your house, your family, your parenting, your holidays, your life decisions, your emotional moments – but you didn’t get to test drive your compatibility in handling those things together. So an atheist is not going to be rationally persuaded to join a religious cult, and a member of a religious cult is not going to be rationally persuaded to become an atheist. But if these two people marry each other, it's quite possible that one of them will change because they love each other, and they don't want to have incompatible beliefs. There are too many to name but Rae Langton, who spent a lot of time in Australia, is a huge inspiration for me, and I like to think about how to precissify Robert Adams’ remark which seems to me to get to the heart of moral philosophy: “we ought, in general, to be treated better than we deserve”.It does seem interesting, however, that some of this comes at the heels of the now diminished New Atheist movement which emphasized some of the practices under fire here: focusing on logical form and facts, public debate and reasoning, etc. This emphasis itself being a reaction to too many of the public being mislead about important scientific facts and how to reason from A to B. Now that that movement's time has passed, it does seem a bit unfair to say, in essence, "That's all fine and great, but nobody's really persuaded by this stuff anyway." That was the point. Nicolas Hommel, who is a third-year Ph.D. student in economics, was recognized for his work as a preceptor in “Econometrics: A Mathematical Approach,” taught by Assistant Professor of Economics Mikkel Plagborg-Møller. The version of the titular 'reasonableness' in the crosshairs at all times remains nebulous despite the philosophical namedropping (many such names themselves recognize that reason is not a mere logical monolith, but nevermind). The push to "stop being reasonable" thankfully ends up not as a push to a do-and-say-whatever-you-want set of norms but a pull away from an exaggerated or aloof ideal of what reason-theater looks and feels like.