The Scenic Route? On Errol Lord’s The Importance of Being Rational

Errol Lord’s The Importance of Being Rational is a beautiful presentation of how one might defend a reasons-first approach to rationality. I’m going to focus these comments on some of the larger systematic ambitions of the book. In doing so, my hope is to draw Lord out concerning the larger project of which the book is a part and to raise some more general questions about the project of defining rationality in terms of reasons. In doing so, my focus with be on the relationship between the reasons-first program and a more traditional view, which we might call the reason-first program.