Back to the future? Georg Simmel and C.S. Lewis revisited

A deeper understanding of practical reason is key in moving beyond the accepted wisdom of our times, where reason risks being reduced to procedural rationality (in the field economics), or to realpolitik in the field of political science and international relations. We recall authors of the past which, in different but very interesting manners, had put forward questions similar to the ones we are raisin g today. Hence, we provide in this note two ‘‘virtual interviews’’, the first to Georg Simmel, German sociologist who in 1903 gave a very insightful lecture on the metropolitan way of life and its influence on economic actionsand on ‘‘mental life’’; the second to Clive Staples Lewis, Irish medievalist, literary critic, essayist – but also novelist and poet –, here ‘‘interviewed’’ on the basis of a series of conferences he gave in 1943 about how modernity contributed in transforming the self-understanding of what makes humans distinctively human - we could say: distinctively reasonable, according to the whole breadth of reason.