More people desperately require an organ than become donors themselves. When discussing organ donation, people mainly consider the question whether they want to donate, whereas empirically they are more likely to be on the receiving end. So it is rational for each of us to join the organ donor register and to agree to donate our relative’s organs, if we are ever in that situation.

The assumption in traditional philosophy of knowledge, of the rational actor completely aware of their own knowledge and actions, was undermined by Freud, and then demolished by researchers in a variety of fields. Several decades of research into decision-making have shown that classical philosophy of knowledge used a simplistic set of assumptions which were inadequate to handle the realities of decision making in non-trivial problems.

Despite his banishment from the philosophy shelves in bookshops, Jung’s thought represents, in fact, a highly sophisticated philosophical position. Maybe it’s time we began to take Jung seriously as a philosopher.

Most writers who invoke the concept of Enlightenment situate it on one side of a titanic clash between the forces of light (good) and the forces of darkness (bad). This “great divide” between reason and unreason generates and gives colour to a varied and influential rhetoric.

Today’s cultural imagination has little room for the idea of the history-making potential of humanity. On the contrary there has been a fundamental shift towards a world view where people are almost entirely written out of history. There has never been a time since the Middle Ages where the human species has been accorded such an insignificant status in the making of history.

One cannot have a revolt on behalf of reason in Islam because reason is central to its worldview: reason is the other side of revelation and the Qur’an presents both as “signs of God”. A Muslim society cannot function without either.

It is now commonplace to observe that the Scottish enlightenment had an effect on the political and educational institutions of North America, including the Constitution of the United States and early colleges such as Princeton. Less well known is its influence on reforming movements in continental Europe, particularly in France and Spain.

When Henry Adams became one of the forty million marveling at the eighty thousand exhibits of the 1900 Paris Exhibition – a Disneyland of engineering – he came to believe that, as the Virgin Mary had once inspired the great leap forward represented by Mont St Michel and Chartres, so technology would transform modern civilization, and so it has.

The belief in progress is now seen as the naïveté of those who really did not know, or want to know, how terrible we human beings can be. We regard ourselves as somewhat wiser and more honest about the self-destructive capabilities of human beings and can find only reasons to turn away from the idea of progress.

Much of the spirit of the Enlightenment was critical and sceptical, concerned with the limits of what can be known. But in taking a more positivist turn the Enlightenment inspired grand palaces of thought where human mess was forever being tidied away. The novel, by contrast, is supremely the place where human mess is celebrated.

The dissimilarities between human artefacts and the universe are striking. We experience only a tiny part of the universe, and much of that is unknown to us. Aren’t our inferences hopelessly anthropomorphic; why not compare the universe to a plant or animal instead?

Normally, we would accuse anyone who holds inconsistent beliefs of irrationality. However, Keenan apologists may claim that in some circumstances it does seem perfectly rational to hold inconsistent beliefs. And we are not alone in this assertion. A small band of philosophers, led most notably by Graham Priest, have also championed this cause, the cause of paraconsistency.