Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I am your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, this episode is a sort of follow-up to the previous episode, 41.

If you didn't catch that, it was an interview with Robert

Zarethki, who's a professor of history. And he was talking about his book, The Philosopher's

Quarrel, which is about the friendship and then the falling out of Rousseau and Hume. And a lot of the

book is exploring the ways in which Rousseau and Hume both took issue with the central project of the Enlightenment, which was about glorifying progress and about trusting reason to solve all problems. And Rousseau and Hume each had their own issues with the idea of reason being the be all and end all. They objected to it in their own separate ways. So for this

episode, 42, we wanted to talk about the limits of reason. And so we mean that not just in terms of

the limits of human ability to reason, like ways in which our brains are not equipped to reason

properly, but also the limits of fields that

rely on reason, like logic and math and science and the failures of attempts to justify those

fields sort of from first principles. And of course, we should note that since this is episode number

42, listeners will get the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything by the end of this episode, right?

No, wait.

To the degree to which it is possible to get, they will get it from our episode.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Right.

So the reason we think that this is an important topic, of course, for the skeptic movement, for science, for critical thinking in general, is because the entire

...