2012 Reports

Reason and Delusion

Bodei, Remo

Delusion represents an exceptional test case for the principal categories
of common sense and philosophical thought such as ‘reason’, ‘truth’, ‘reality’. With the engagement of a hidden part of Freud’s legacy and the most discussed results of twentieth-century psychiatry, my aim will be to analyze its paradoxical forms and to shed light on the logics that underlie and orient its specific modalities of temporalization, conceptualization and argumentation. Delusion, then, has been traditionally interpreted as synonymous with irrationality (absurdity, groundlessness, error, chaos), whereas by contrast its mirror image, reason, has been defined in terms of evidence, demonstrability, truth and order. I will analyze and contrast their paradoxical definitions.