Reasoning: Another tool in the toolbox
As regards the supposed inescapability of rationality, or, alternatively, the impossibility of justifying it (or more broadly, its immunity to rational critique whether supportive or undermining), I offer the following considerations. To begin with, in the back of my mind has always been a kind of puzzle about reasoning -- an unexamined assumption, as it were, of which I have been inchoately and a little troublingly aware and am now attempting to articulate -- namely: Why is the legitimacy of any belief or claim (taking these as actual events and not merely abstract propositions) -- and according to a rationalist, this would seem to be legitimacy tout court , that is, legitimacy qua a belief or claim, and not just rational legitimacy (which term is a kind of redundancy), analogous to the way moral demands purport to be categorical and overriding of all other kinds as regards actions -- dependent on some other belief(s) or claim(s)? There would seem to be two ways to que