Damon, Francisco, and Peter take the opportunity to reflect on the intellectual roots of their alma mater, St. John's College, by discussing Jacob Klein's essay, "Modern Rationalism." Jacob Klein was the dean of St. John's, and this episode comes in between having two tutors of the college as guests on the podcast (Close Reed #15 and #17), both of which episodes are related to the problems posed by modernity and how to respond to them. 

Klein takes a unique approach to the problem, through the history of mathematics. For him, the conditions of modernity are fundamentally created by the premises of modern mathematical physics and the conceptual shifts we had to make in order to create such a science. He traces this to the origin of the algebraic method developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, claiming that the shift from thinking about numbers as related to definite, concrete multitudes ('4' means '::'), to numbers as any possible multitudes you please ('a' means 'any number'), is a novel and radical break. This break is distinguished from the Greek or medieval mathematics by its greater separation from concrete reality. This separation was made possible because of the mind-body dualism created by Descartes (who is also one of the originators of modern algebra), creating the conceptual possibility for the world to be known through pure ideas alone, in complete separation from the environment (also known as rationalism). Klein then connects this development with the conditions of today, specifically the rise of capitalism and a highly ordered world, thus diagnosing our time as 'modern rationalism'. In this episode, we primarily try to clarify and map out these connections.