Calvin Holder, a history professor who is black, said he had agreed to moderate last month's Jeffries program because "the academy can and should be the place where views we consider abhorrent can be discussed rationally."

Anderson adds that the speech had no effect on immigration, except to make it more difficult for the subject to be discussed rationally in polite society.

Greek theologians who had been trained in Italy and who had been very impressed by Aquinas and his Aristotelian Christianity were opposed and defeated by St Gregory Palamas, who refused to consider God in any sense as a concept, however inspiring, that could be rationally discussed and analysed.

Some critics of the new field argued that ethical convictions were based on little more than emotion or faith and could not be rationally discussed or analyzed.

There are several schools of thought regarding the status of normative statements and whether they can be rationally discussed or defended.

We have succeeded in showing that there can be rational talk about ethics, and that a lot of medical practice involves moral decisions that can be rationally discussed.

The Higher Criticism could no longer be discussed rationally, since it evoked fundamental fears.

But the pros and cons should be discussed rationally without resorting to inflammatory nonsense.

Had county officials talked with the students, discrepancies could have been discussed rationally and procedural problems could have been solved.

What is so striking about the 13 welfare regulations he sought to impose three decades ago is not how Draconian they seem in retrospect, but how many of them have been adopted, proposed or rationally discussed in recent months by Republicans and more than a few Democrats.