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"What we must beware of," he said, "is becoming 'misologists', hating arguments in the way 'misanthropists' hate their fellow men.He goes on to argue that a hatred of people, and a hatred of reason, arise much the same way.
Misanthropy creeps in as a result of placing too much trust in someone without having the knowledge required: we suppose the person to be completely genuine, sound and trustworth, only to find a bit later that he's bad an untrustworthy, and then it happens again with someone else; when we've experienced the same thing many times over, and especially when it's with those we'd have supposed our nearest and dearest, we get fed up with making so many mistakes and so end up hating everyone and supposing no one to be sound in any respect.
Philosophers and cognitive scientists today generally comprehend the domain of reason as a certain power of making inferences, confined to the thoughts and actions of human beings alone. Like echolocation in bats or photosynthesis in plants, reason is an evolved power, but unlike these, the prevailing theory goes, it emerged exactly once in the history of evolution (porpoises and shrews also echolocate, cyanobacteria photosynthesise).
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