Amartya Sen
London
8 August 1990

The Sanskrit word for philosophy – darsana – also means seeing clearly. Philosophy does have much to do with clarifying matters – not through specialized knowledge but through reasoning. It is possible, of course, to be wonderfully clear and dead wrong.

But lucidity does not help the survival of baseless beliefs, silly deductions, groundless prejudice, or the justification of needless misery. Well, that’s something for clear reasoning, even though it wont solve all our problems