Rationality

The Ancient Greeks were very very into rationality. They meant that in every sense of the word: they wanted to behave rationally and they wanted their numbers to be rational. In fact, they believed that all numbers were rational. Then they discovered that they were wrong about this; most notably the square root of two is not rational. So then they had to admit the existence of these irrational numbers, and eventually there came these "transcendental" numbers that aren't even the roots of any integer-coefficiented polynomial, and then further on these "imaginary" numbers that aren't even on the same effing number line. So the "rationals-only" worldview turned out to be very, very wrong, wrong by several orders of magnitude.

What's my point? It's sort of just a metaphor for an earlier post, also on rationality, in which I suggested that philosophers and their ilk are too caught up on being rational and in doing so tend to undervalue non-rational parts of life, like emotion. It's a slightly simplistic metaphor, but I think the general philosophical enamorment with rationality is probably derived from the Greeks, but of course the fact that not all numbers are rational, and hell, not all numbers are real, hasn't necessarily done much to shake that worldview. Irrational, transcendental, and imaginary things count! That is my point.