Notes for 2/16/2026

 2/16/2026
[Philosophy Club every Monday, 4-5 pm, in the Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences room 436 ("The Cave")]
[Bioethics Club: Mondays from 5:30pm-6:30pm in Leigh Hall 408]

Is there such a thing as being “too rational”?
 What, exactly, is rationality?

Aristotle distinguished theoretical reason (episteme: what you think/believe) and practical reason (phronesis: how you act/choose). 
These correspond to epistemology and ethics.


The main topic this week is epistemology.

“Thought moves. For it to move ‘well’ is rationality.”


The core of Aristotelean science was observation and classification.
This echoes Plato’s theory of Forms.
The fact that different things can somehow be thought of as the same makes it possible to formulate RULES.

Rules, by their very nature, are general (applicable to different cases on the basis of their similarity).

One sense of understanding something is to be able to think of it in terms of the rules that apply to it.

This is the heart of Plato’s theory of Forms: to understand a thing is to know its Form.
(Aristotle: to understand a thing is to know its proper classification.
Kant: Understanding is applying concepts to our raw experiences.)

This suggests one important component of rationality: Applying concepts consistently to similar cases (“rational consistency/parity,” “formal equality”).

Inconsistency is one way of failing rationality (think of hypocrisy, for example).

Concepts should be applied to things because of accuracy, rather than for self-serving reasons.

Another sense of rationality consists in good inference.

To say that a belief is based on ‘good reasons’ means that there is a good deductive or inductive (or abductive) argument for it.


A belief is generally defined as an attitude of acceptance toward a claim (statement/proposition). To believe a claim is to think that it is (or is most likely) true.