In Humanist Reason: A History, an Argument, a Plan (Columbia UP, 2021), Eric Hayot develops the concept of “humanist reason” to understand the nature and purpose of humanist intellectual work and lays out a serious of principles that undergird this core idea. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our world.

Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University, where he is also Director of the Center for Humanities and Information. His books include Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quell (U of Michigan P), The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford UP), On Literary Worlds (Oxford UP), The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (Columbia UP), and, most recently, Humanist Reason (Columbia UP), published in 2021. He edited and co-edited numerous books and in 2018 he published with Lea Pao a translation of Peter Janich’s What is Information? (U of Minnesota P).

Bryant Scott is a professor in the Liberal Arts department at Texas A & M University at Qatar.

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