Modern Philosophical Rationalism Explained

Understanding Rationalism

Insecure, if not a lifelong dream and the world a stage, as Shakespeare says.

Types of Modern Rationalism

There are three types of modern rationalism:

• Psychological Rationalism: Reason is equated with thinking over emotion and will.
• Metaphysical Rationalism: Reality possesses a rational character.
• Epistemological Rationalism: Reason is the only appropriate source and means of knowledge. This idea stems from two key assumptions:
  • Our knowledge can be constructed deductively from clear ideas and principles.
  • These ideas and principles are innate to the understanding, possessed independently of any sensory experience.

Characteristics of Rationalism (16th-18th Centuries)

Rationalism, as a specific school of thought that developed in Continental Europe during the 16th and 18th centuries, characterized by its metaphysical doctrine and analysis of human knowledge, also features:

• Overconfidence in Reason: Rationalists believed reason could produce fundamental ideas independently (rationalist nativism), opposing empiricism, which held that ideas are drawn from experience.
• Mathematical Method as Model: They saw the mathematical method, with its evident principles and necessary proofs, as applicable to all knowledge, believing knowledge could be built from rationally developed definitions from which all other conclusions derive.
• Subjectivity in Knowledge Analysis: Rationalists started with the certainty of the thinking subject. Before being certain of the world's existence, one feels the evidence of the self that thinks, directly knowing only one's own mental content or ideas.
• Mechanistic View of Reality: Physical reality, especially for Descartes, was understood similarly to a machine. The machine world is explained by particulate matter and movements that give rise to other movements.

Conclusion: Rationalism and Modern Metaphysics

In short, following the model of mathematical certainty, philosophical rationalism built new systems that eventually replaced those of Scholastic metaphysics, becoming modern metaphysics.