As Pascal wrote, ‘The ultimate achievement of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can't get as far as understanding that.’ Almost three hundred years later, Gödel proved that this is necessarily so, not accidental but essential truth. But to see this takes genius. Most people are completely and unreflectively seduced by the rhetoric of reason. And incidentally, some recent influential work in evolutionary theory suggests that this may be the whole purpose of logic – not to understand, but to persuade, to seduce, others and win
...more
