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Now Don't Try to Reason With Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age
In this entertaining collection of essays, Wayne Booth looks for the much-maligned “middle ground” for reason—a rhetoric that can unite truths of the heart with truths of the head and allow us all to discover shared convictions in mutual inquiry. First delivered as lectures in the 1960s, when Booth was a professor at Earlham College and the University of Chicago, Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me still resounds with anyone struggling for consensus in a world of us versus them.
“Professor Booth’s earnestness is graced by wit, irony, and generous humor.”—Louis Coxe, New Republic
“Professor Booth’s earnestness is graced by wit, irony, and generous humor.”—Louis Coxe, New Republic
387 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 22, 2014
Booth's extremely centrist collection of essays is certainly a book of its time (1960s-70s). It is more useful for what it says about the different type of problems facing the University of his era compared to the present time than it is for helping students navigate the intellectual climate of the 2000s. One recurring theme of these essays is Booth's insistence on the importance of rationality alongside other human elements of understanding and decision-making, such as emotional components. Rather than fully exploring how those two elements (and a few others) are tangled together, he hammers hard on the need for rationality without touching on what emotions bring to the table.
Overall I don't recommend this book except to historians looking to breath the cultural air of the 60s-70s, but there were a few take-aways that interested me, even if they weren't earth-shattering or particularly new:
*Beware futurism--a hyper-focus on future outcomes which overlooks the importance and relevance of the present.
*Don't rule out external motives--people want to believe they do research for pure motives like furthering the understanding of humanity, etc. whereas external motives like good grades or pleasing a professor are base. Booth argues that external motives provide the push people need when their pure motives are temporarily if not frequently exhausted.
*There aren't many actual relativists--most people recognize that we are all doomed to partiality, we can't know or see all, and we all have perspectives which are relatively valid. "Relatively" implies some sort of standard by which we can assess differing perspectives, however, so relativism in his sense differs from the extreme "anything goes" type of thing. (He outlines 4 perspectives people bring to the task of, say, interpreting literature: the Dogmatist, the Skeptic, the Eclectic, and the Pluralist.) Seek a common ground on which to discuss and assess positions first.
*Aristotle is still of great use when it comes to critiquing literature.
Overall I don't recommend this book except to historians looking to breath the cultural air of the 60s-70s, but there were a few take-aways that interested me, even if they weren't earth-shattering or particularly new:
*Beware futurism--a hyper-focus on future outcomes which overlooks the importance and relevance of the present.
*Don't rule out external motives--people want to believe they do research for pure motives like furthering the understanding of humanity, etc. whereas external motives like good grades or pleasing a professor are base. Booth argues that external motives provide the push people need when their pure motives are temporarily if not frequently exhausted.
*There aren't many actual relativists--most people recognize that we are all doomed to partiality, we can't know or see all, and we all have perspectives which are relatively valid. "Relatively" implies some sort of standard by which we can assess differing perspectives, however, so relativism in his sense differs from the extreme "anything goes" type of thing. (He outlines 4 perspectives people bring to the task of, say, interpreting literature: the Dogmatist, the Skeptic, the Eclectic, and the Pluralist.) Seek a common ground on which to discuss and assess positions first.
*Aristotle is still of great use when it comes to critiquing literature.
November 5, 2011
As is so often true, Booth is better at talking about rhetoric than at doing it.
May 23, 2012
Great and important book about the need to reconcile reason and values. Gets bogged down by more technical chapters 3/4 of the way through, but the ending is beautiful. MUST read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews