rationalism
Sign in to saveIn philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "the position that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge", often in contrast to other possible sources of knowledge such as faith, tradition, or sensory experience. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".
AI overview
Rationalism is a philosophical approach that treats reason and logical thinking as the most reliable way to discover what is true, rather than relying on faith, tradition, or what our senses tell us. It matters because it represents a fundamental stance on how we should pursue knowledge and understand the world—emphasizing intellectual analysis and deductive reasoning as our best tools for finding truth.
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25 sectionsContents
- Background<!--'Continental rationalism' and 'Continental Rationalism' redirect here-->
- Political usage
- Philosophical usage
- Intuition/deduction thesis
- Innate knowledge thesis
- Innate concept thesis
- History
- Rationalist philosophy in Western antiquity
- Pythagoras (570–495 BCE)
- Plato (427–347 BCE)
- Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
- Middle Ages
- Classical rationalism
- René Descartes (1596–1650)
- Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)
- Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)
- Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
- Contemporary rationalism
- Criticism
- See also
- References
- Sources
- Primary
- Secondary
- External links
In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "the position that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge", often in contrast to other possible sources of knowledge such as faith, tradition, or sensory experience. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".
In a major philosophical debate during the Enlightenment, rationalism (sometimes here equated with innatism) was opposed to empiricism. On the one hand, rationalists like René Descartes emphasized that knowledge is primarily innate and the intellect, the inner faculty of the human mind, can therefore directly grasp or derive logical truths; on the other hand, empiricists like John Locke emphasized that knowledge is not primarily innate and is best gained by careful observation of the physical world outside the mind, namely through sensory experiences. Rationalists asserted that certain principles exist in logic, mathematics, ethics, and metaphysics that are so fundamentally true that denying them causes one to fall into contradiction. The rationalists had such a high confidence in reason that empirical proof and physical evidence were regarded as unnecessary to ascertain certain truthsin other words, "there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience".