Reason is the faculty of inference and coherence - the capacity to move from premises to conclusions, demand consistency, weigh evidence, and give an account (logos) of why. In the classical picture it was never mere calculation: Plato distinguished discursive reasoning (Dianoia) from direct intellection (noesis), placing both on a ladder that runs from opinion up through mathematics to contemplation of the forms. Reason in this older sense is the soul’s kinship with the intelligible realm - the Logos in us answering to the Logos in the world, which is why the Greeks could treat rationality as participation in cosmic order rather than a private processing skill.
Modernity kept reason but narrowed it. The scientific revolution’s restriction of explanation to efficient and material causes redefined rationality as instrumental: calculating means toward given ends, with the ends themselves declared beyond rational assessment. This is reason as engine rather than eye - powerful for prediction and control, silent on meaning, purpose, and value. The the meaning crisis critique holds that this instrumental narrowing is itself unreasonable: a faculty that once adjudicated what is worth wanting now merely optimizes whatever is wanted, and Wisdom - the discrimination of ends - falls outside its remit.
Contemporary Cognitive Science complicates the picture from another side. Reasoning runs on machinery it did not choose: perception, attention, Emotion, and embodied cognition shape what shows up as evidence at all, and the same adaptive processes that make us intelligent generate systematic self-deception - Vervaeke’s foolishness, which no amount of raw inference dispels. Reason is also social: argument evolved for persuasion and coordination, functioning best as Distributed Cognition - dialectic between minds that catch each other’s errors - rather than as solitary computation.
Understanding reason means neither crowning nor dethroning it: it is one mode of knowing that requires the others - perceptual, participatory, embodied, contemplative - to furnish its materials and aim its use. Reason severed from those roots turns rationalization; reason integrated with them is a component of wisdom.
See also cognition, Epistemology, Dianoia, noesis, Logos, metacognition, Wisdom, dialectic