rationalism

We explain what rationalism in philosophy is, its characteristics and representatives. Also, differences with empiricism and humanism.

René Descartes aspired to turn philosophy into a scientific discipline.

What is rationalism?

Rationalism is a philosophical movement that emerged in the Modern age of the West, specifically in the Europe from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This current held that reason was the main human mechanism of acquisition of knowledge. In this he distinguished himself from empiricism, its opposite current, which established the importance of the senses and experience as a way to the learning.

Rationalism defended the postulate that the knowledge human comes from his ability to reason, something that constituted in itself a change of thought substantial compared to past times, where that role was fulfilled by religious faith.

Consequently, this philosophical current could only emerge after the important changes cultural events that occurred in the West during the Renaissance and the end of the Middle Ages, although it is possible to trace his ancestors as far back as Plato's, in the Ancient Greece.

The French thinker René Descartes was the founder of rationalism. He was an admirer of geometry and math, which he considered a model to follow for all forms of philosophy.

Descartes aspired to convert the philosophy in a scientific discipline, provided with a methodsince, in his opinion, only by reason could certain truths universal. Thus, in its Discourse of the method proposed his four rules for all philosophical research:

  • Evidence. It is only true that which does not cause doubts to the thought.
  • Analysis. Understand something reducing it to its constituent parts.
  • Deduction. Find complex truths from known simple ones.
  • Verification. Make sure that what is known by reason follows these four established rules.

The term "rationalism" in our days has acquired other connotations, serving to refer to any philosophical position that gives reason a central place over faith, superstition or other forms of thought.

Characteristics of rationalism

Rationalism was characterized by the following:

  • Sustain reason and thought as the source of all human knowledge.
  • Believe in innateness: that in the human spirit there are preconceived ideas, born with it or put there by God.
  • He preferred the use of logical-deductive methods to explain empirical reasonings and confirm them when possible.
  • It played a pivotal role in the advent of secular (and anti-religious) thought.
  • Its main defenders came from France, Germany and other countries of continental Europe, opposed to empiricism coming from England.

Representatives of rationalism

Baruch Spinoza is considered the father of modern thought.

The main representatives of rationalism were:

  • René Descartes (1596-1650). Philosopher, mathematician and physicist of French origin, father of the analytic geometry and of modern philosophy, was one of the great names of the Scientific revolution, whose work broke with the scholasticism that prevailed until then. Together with Spinoza and Leibniz, he makes up the trio of the greatest rationalists of the history.
  • Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). French mathematician, physicist, theologian, philosopher and writer, who not only contributed theoretically with the natural Sciences and natural history, but with practically all Sciences: is one of the pioneers in the construction of mechanical calculators.
  • Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Dutch Jewish philosopher, considered one of the great rationalists of the 17th century, whose work was harassed by Catholicism and forgotten until its rediscovery in the 19th century. Later philosophers such as Hegel and Schelling proclaim him 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, who is conferred 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 strands that the skepticism They were rationalism, in favor of giving human rationality a central place in learning, and also empiricism, which proposed to give 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 each key, in their own way, in the development of the scientific thought as we understand it today.

Rationalism and humanism

The rationalist movement has similarities to the humanism, at least in its secular version, in the sense that it considers human reason as the only true way to the truth of things. Thus, rationalism displaced the religious faith that had reigned in Western thought during the Middle Ages.

This displacement allows the emergence of a philosophical thought alien to religion, which is also central to the doctrine of humanism, whose main objective was to place the human being, and not God, at the center of the world. This does not mean that rationalism was atheistic, since it did not rule out or affirm the existence of God a priori.

On the other hand, secular humanism proposed a revaluing and worthy vision of the human being, for which a rationalist, skeptical vision is fundamental, although in it the issue is also important ethical of the human being, something that the rationalists did not contemplate. In this way, not every rationalist would come to be a humanist.

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