Locality of Reason
Social, Cultural and Anthropological Contexts of Rationality

Lokalność rozumu
Społeczne, kulturowe i antropologiczne konteksty racjonalności

OPUS-17

2019/33/B/HS1/03003

The researchers of the project Locality of Reason (LOR) – an idea of Prof. Jakub Jan Kloc-Konkołowicz – consider it to be one of the main tasks of philosophy to analyze and interpret the notion of reason. We believe that the notion of reason, with its intrinsic value of universality, plays a crucial role in guaranteeing a solid ground for human communication, for interaction and for mutual understanding between different cultures and traditions, as well as for formulating general rules and values which include human beings in practices and institutions of the modern world.

Still, we understand the defence of the notion of reason not as a simple revival of the classical concept of reason, which regards it as a universal faculty above the historical and cultural contexts. Our hypothesis is rather that reason is not understandable independently from a set of different strategies aimed at its self-construction. This approach to reason is marked by the notion of 'locality': the self-construction of reason, namely, does not take place in some theoretical vacuum but is always rooted in social, cultural, historical, anthropological and ethnological contexts.