Joseph Agassi and the Various Guises of Magic

Abstract

Joseph Agassi’s last book, The Philosophy of Practical Affairs, offers a comprehensive look at key philosophical topics and doctrines with a common focus on the role of rationality, the evolution of rationality and the relationship between rationality and akin phenomena. A key topic he addresses is the relationship between rationality and magic. This dichotomy reverberates on a number of areas of applied philosophy, including philosophical practice and philosophically informed psychotherapy. Agassi’s views on magic offer a fundamentally rationalist view of the phenomenon of magic, however they open up significant inroads into nuanced insights of how magic can be seen as a cognitively significant complement to rationality in the strict sense.