Charles Taylor, the philosopher, was in Cambridge talking about the relationship between reason and the passions, intuition and revelation, science and religion. I've written about part of what he had to say for the Guardian's Cif. A taster:

So, the suggestion is that you could be forgiven for concluding that science is only possible because scientists are prepared to make a collective leap of faith, a commitment to the prevailing paradigm. Further, science just wouldn't be possible if scientists always and everywhere adhered to the scientific method alone, the procedures that have come to define what counts as rational. Something other than repeated observations and correct inference is required for progress.

Taylor had other observations that I couldn't work into the piece, though offer in rather unsatisfactorily truncated form here:

To understand something you have to love it, because understanding is never a completely disengaged stance but springs from inspiration.

Reason is never disengaged but is always in relation to our embodied engagement with the world, because it's to do with our perceptions of the world.

Feelings aren't 'brute', as the Enlightenment conception of rationality teaches, but rather are our perceptions of the world.

Science has dropped it's exploration of the teleological, central for Aristotle, though teleology is undoubtedly a feature of the world, not least in the human sciences.

Some paradigms never gain universal agreement, because what scientists commit to is linked to the values they hold.

We'll never achieve a total consensus on how to solve our problems, though there will be overlaps when people come to the same conclusions, if by different means.

(Image: Padraic Ryan)