We explain what rationalism is, its characteristics, and representatives. Also, we discuss its differences with empiricism and humanism. Please read other MTV articles for more information. If you share it, it will be of little help to us.
What is rationalism?
Rationalism is a philosophical movement that promotes reason as the primary faculty of knowledge. It emerged in the Modern Age, specifically in 17th and 18th-century Europe, and is often considered the opposite of empiricism, which prioritized sensitivity over reason.
Rationalism defends the idea that human knowledge comes from reason and our capacity to reason. This in itself constituted a substantial shift in thinking compared to the Middle Ages, a time when religious faith played that role.
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History of Rationalism
Rationalism arose from certain cultural changes that occurred in the West during the Renaissance and the late Middle Ages.
These changes were related to the emergence of different interpretations of the sacred books of monotheistic religions, especially Christianity and Judaism. The idea of divine truth as the criterion of truth for the sciences began to be questioned. However, the antecedents of rationalism can be traced back to Ancient Greece, in the theories of thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle.
René Descartes (1596-1650) is traditionally considered the founder of this movement. His famous expression “I think, therefore I am,” known as the Cartesian cogito, accurately represents the metaphysical postulates of rationalism.
A philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, Descartes was a great admirer of geometry and mathematics, sciences he considered models for all forms of philosophy. He aspired to transform philosophy into a scientific discipline, provided with a method, since, in his view, certain universal truths could only be discovered through reason.
His dream about this subject is famous, as we know from his diaries and notes. He dreamed of a dictionary and a poetry anthology, the Corpus Poetarum. When he awoke, he concluded that the dictionary contained all the sciences together, including poetry, which was only possible by combining all the words in the other book. From this stems his idea of the unity of science, as well as its universality and the idea that all knowledge lies at the base of the tree of sciences.
In his Discourse on Method (1637), he proposed four rules for all philosophical inquiry:
- Evidence: This consists of considering as true only that which is self-evident. This will be the seed of hyperbolic doubt as a method for discovering the truth.
- Analysis: This consists of dividing each topic into as many parts as possible until the simplest elements are found. These elements will be true if they can be grasped through immediate and evident intuition.
- Synthesis: This consists of finding complex truths from the simplest truths.
- Enumeration: This consists of reviewing each of the steps taken until one is sure that none have been omitted or that no deduction errors have been made.
The Metaphysical Meditations, whose full title is Metaphysical Meditations in which the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul are Demonstrated (1641), are considered the metaphysical explication and justification of the method. In this book, Descartes sought to find a guarantor (God) for rational knowledge, first, and for all types of knowledge, later. Originally written in Latin, a French version was printed in 1647 under the supervision of Descartes himself.
Other philosophers, contemporary and subsequent to Descartes, are also considered representatives of rationalism. Some of them were the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and the Germans Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754).
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Characteristics of Rationalism
Rationalism is characterized by the following general ideas:
- Upholding reason and thought as the source of all human knowledge.
- Believing in innatism. Preconceived ideas exist in the human mind or spirit, either born with the human mind or placed there by God.
- Using logical-deductive methods to explain empirical reasoning and confirm it when possible.
- Playing a fundamental role in the emergence of secular (and anti-religious) thought.
Its main proponents lived and worked in France, Germany, and other continental European countries, opposing the empiricism that originated in England.
Representatives of Rationalism
The main representatives of rationalism were:
René Descartes (1596-1650)
French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, father of analytical geometry and modern philosophy, he was one of the great figures of the Scientific Revolution, whose work broke with the prevailing scholasticism. Along with Spinoza and Leibniz, he forms the trio of the greatest rationalists in history.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
French mathematician, physicist, theologian, philosopher, and writer, he not only made theoretical contributions to the natural sciences and natural history, but to virtually all sciences. He is one of the pioneers in the construction of mechanical calculators.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
Dutch Jewish philosopher, he is considered one of the great rationalists of the 17th century. His work was harassed by Catholicism and forgotten until its rediscovery in the 19th century. Later philosophers such as Hegel and Schelling hailed him as the father of modern thought.
Gottlieb Leibniz (1646-1716)
Of German origin, this mathematician, theologian, jurist, librarian, politician, and philosopher was one of the great thinkers of his time, bestowed with the title of “last universal genius.” His contributions in all the aforementioned areas are significant, so much so that even his detractors deeply admired him.
Rationalism and Empiricism
The two philosophical trends that followed skepticism were rationalism, which advocated giving human rationality a central place in learning, and empiricism, which proposed giving that place to experience and the world of the senses.
These two models were opposed throughout the Modern Age and constituted the philosophical poles of the West, fathers of later philosophical schools and fundamental in the development of scientific thought as we understand it today.
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Rationalism and Humanism
The rationalist movement bears similarities to humanism, at least in its secular version, because it considers human reason as the only true path to the truth of things. Thus, rationalism displaced the religious faith that had prevailed in Western thought during the Middle Ages.
This shift allows for the emergence of philosophical thought outside of religion, which is also central to the doctrine of humanism, whose central objective was to place the human being, and not God, at the center of the world. This does not mean that rationalism was necessarily atheistic, since it neither rules out nor affirms a priori the existence of God. In fact, many thinkers, such as Descartes and Leibniz, placed God as the guarantor of reason in the acquisition of knowledge.
For its part, secular humanism proposed a revaluing and dignified vision of the human being, for which a rationalist, skeptical view is fundamental, although the ethical question of the human being is also important. Thus, not every rationalist is necessarily a humanist, even though these currents have many theoretical points in common.
What does rationalism mean today?
The term “rationalism” has acquired other connotations in our time: it is used to refer to any philosophical position that gives reason a central place above faith, superstition, or other forms of thought. Idealism, cognitive philosophy, and humanism are examples where the term rationalism is used with this connotation.
References
All the information we offer is supported by authoritative and up-to-date bibliographic sources, which ensure reliable content in line with our editorial principles.
- Verneaux, R. (1999). General Epistemology or Critique of Knowledge. Herder.
- Fraenkel, Carlos; Perinetti, Dario; Smith, Justin E. H. (eds.). (2011). The Rationalists: Between Tradition and Innovation. Springer.
- Pereboom, D. (ed.). (1999). The Rationalists: Critical Essays on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Rowman & Littlefield.
- Rationalism / Empiricism in the Soviet Dictionary of Philosophy.
- Rationalism vs. Empiricism in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Rationalism in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
