metatron,
good points, but it's no wonder that the Western, post-Christian definition of reason seems to fit the intellectual paradigm of Christianity better than any other; moreover, the kind of Christianity that was the background for Enlightenment is that which had developed through the (re-)discovery of a long-forgotten part of Greek philosophical tradition (physical and metaphysical, i.e. Aristotle), through the mediation of Jewish and Muslim scholars in the late middle-ages, paving the way for the neo-classicism of the Renaissance. And, otoh, there are many economic and political reasons why other types of approach to knowledge ("ethno-methods") lost their ground to the post-Enlightenment Western understanding of reason as the only "modern" paradigm. Iow, what we term reason is the product of a historical, contingent and arbitrary process throughout... And while this process does seem to conquer the whole world in globalisation ("globalatinisation" as Derrida puts it, in French mondialatinisation) the Western counter-trends are no less real: philosophical "post-modernism" of course, but religious fundamentalism, "New Age" and many other things too, are not simply "vestiges of a doomed past"; they are as much a part of the "21th century" as the Internet and quantum physics... and symptoms of the limits of Western type of "reason," the narrow definition of which has contributed to the expansion and appeal of the unreasonable, or "irrational".