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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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...
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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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Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian priest and one of the most original Cartesian philosophers of the seventeenth century. His Search After Truth combined Descartes' rati...
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Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff was a German philosopher, mathematician, and the most influential continental rationalist between Leibniz and Kant. He developed a vast, systematic philosophy in...
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Samuel Clarke
Samuel Clarke was an English Anglican clergyman and philosopher of religion, a close associate of Newton and the foremost rationalist theologian of his age. His Boyle Lectures o...
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Antoine Arnauld
Antoine Arnauld was a French Catholic theologian, logician, and philosopher and the leading figure of the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal. With Pierre Nicole he produced the Po...
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Christian Thomasius
Christian Thomasius was a German jurist, philosopher, and reformer and one of the founders of the German Enlightenment. The first university lecturer in Germany to teach philoso...
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Johann Nicolaus Tetens
Johann Nicolaus Tetens was a German philosopher, psychologist, and economist of the late Enlightenment and one of the most important predecessors of Kant in the German philosoph...
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Leon Brunschvicg
Leon Brunschvicg was a French philosopher and the leading representative of French rationalist idealism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Long-time professor at the...