My colleague and good friend Guilherme Brambatti Guzzo and I started this project in 2019. It is a space dedicated to archiving ideas that we develop through our interactions, personal experiences, and independent studies. It has currently welcomed more than 24 thousand readers from around the world and received over 33 thousand reads of our material.
We think of it in the following way: There are many ways we can try to make sense of the world around us and our own lives. We can rely on fast and “automatic” thinking processes, on our intuitions, on our preconceptions, on the ideas of a group with which we identify, and so on. On some occasions, the conclusions we draw from these methods help us and are important for our purposes, or they provide suitable answers to the questions we have or the problems we are trying to solve. But in many other situations, thinking quickly or following the views of our tribe leads us away from the truth or makes us blind to it.
When we face complex topics that are important to us, to other people, and to other sentient beings, or subjects we are not familiar with, it is wise to invest our cognitive efforts in trying to understand them more properly. In other words, we need to venture down the paths of reason, carefully evaluating the evidence relevant to what we are investigating, seeking well-founded answers, and being willing to adjust our confidence in those answers according to the strength of the reasons that support them.
Of course, the paths of reason are not infallible and they do not grant us direct access to the truth. Even so, they tend to increase our chances of better understanding a wide range of topics. As the philosopher Julian Baggini wrote, reason is “an imperfect tool for imperfect users,” better understood “as a navigational tool that can help us get closer to the truth if we know how to use it and if we know what we are looking for.” (1) We must therefore learn to use this tool more effectively and have the wisdom to apply it in the situations where it is needed. We will follow the Paths of Reason, as far as we are able, to address topics that are generally dependent on reason. In this way, we use the space of this website to discuss science, education, philosophy, psychology, and anything else that interests us. Welcome to this space, and feel free to explore the Paths with us.
1 - Baggini, J. A short history of truth: consolations for a post-truth world. London: Quercus, 2017, p. 49.
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