Publisher's Synopsis
This collection of essays defends the ideal of rationality, but insists that rationality should not be identified with a mental faculty or a mechanism of inference, but taken rather as the capacity to grasp principles and purposes and to evaluate them in the light of relevant reasons. Topics range from computers in schools to metaphor and morality but throughout Scheffler is especially concerned to counteract the narrowing of educational vision accompanying the technological revolution now sweeping education. Offering a background in human nature for understanding human potential, and viewing reason as an outgrowth of symbolic capacity, Scheffler emphasizes its intimate connections with emotion and its teleological productive roles.
