Most Famous Rationalism Philosophers
Rationalism is the philosophical view that reason is the chief source and test of knowledge. Its leading early modern proponents, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, held that the mind possesses innate ideas or principles from which substantive truths about reality can be derived. Rationalists typically grant mathematics a privileged status as a model of certain knowledge. The position contrasts with empiricism, which traces knowledge to sense experience. The seventeenth-century rationalist program shaped both modern philosophy and the foundations of mathematical physics.
Philosophers in this tradition
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Rene Descartes
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist often called the father of modern philosophy. In the Meditations on First Philosophy he applied methodic do...
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Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza was a 17th-century Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent, regarded as one of the leading rationalists of the early modern period. His major work, the Eth...
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Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a 17th-century German polymath and one of the leading rationalist philosophers of the early modern period. He invented infinitesimal calculus indep...