Rationalism

In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that 'regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge' or 'any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification'. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory 'in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive'.In the past, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, the term 'rationalist' was often used to refer to free thinkers of an anti-clerical and anti-religious outlook, and for a time the word acquired a distinctly pejorative force (thus in 1670 Sanderson spoke disparagingly of 'a mere rationalist, that is to say in plain English an atheist of the late edition...'). The use of the label 'rationalist' to characterize a world outlook which has no place for the supernatural is becoming less popular today; terms like 'humanist' or 'materialist' seem largely to have taken its place. But the old usage still survives. In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that 'regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge' or 'any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification'. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory 'in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive'. In an old controversy, rationalism was opposed to empiricism, where the rationalists believed that reality has an intrinsically logical structure. Because of this, the rationalists argued that certain truths exist and that the intellect can directly grasp these truths. That is to say, rationalists asserted that certain rational 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 truths – in other words, 'there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience'. Different degrees of emphasis on this method or theory lead to a range of rationalist standpoints, from the moderate position 'that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge' to the more extreme position that reason is 'the unique path to knowledge'. Given a pre-modern understanding of reason, rationalism is identical to philosophy, the Socratic life of inquiry, or the zetetic (skeptical) clear interpretation of authority (open to the underlying or essential cause of things as they appear to our sense of certainty). In recent decades, Leo Strauss sought to revive 'Classical Political Rationalism' as a discipline that understands the task of reasoning, not as foundational, but as maieutic. In the 17th-century Dutch Republic, the rise of early modern-period rationalism — as a highly systematic school of philosophy in its own right for the first time in history — exerted an immense and profound influence on modern Western thought in general, with the birth of two influential rationalistic philosophical systems of Descartes (who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic in the period 1628–1649 and despite frequent moves, he wrote all his major work during his 20-plus years in the United Provinces) and Spinoza — namely Cartesianism and Spinozism. It was the 17th-century arch-rationalists like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz who have given the 'Age of Reason' its name and place in history. In politics, rationalism, since the Enlightenment, historically emphasized a 'politics of reason' centered upon rational choice, utilitarianism, secularism, and irreligion – the latter aspect's antitheism was later softened by the adoption of pluralistic methods practicable regardless of religious or irreligious ideology. In this regard, the philosopher John Cottingham noted how rationalism, a methodology, became socially conflated with atheism, a worldview: Rationalism is often contrasted with empiricism. Taken very broadly, these views are not mutually exclusive, since a philosopher can be both rationalist and empiricist. Taken to extremes, the empiricist view holds that all ideas come to us a posteriori, that is to say, through experience; either through the external senses or through such inner sensations as pain and gratification. The empiricist essentially believes that knowledge is based on or derived directly from experience. The rationalist believes we come to knowledge a priori – through the use of logic – and is thus independent of sensory experience. In other words, as Galen Strawson once wrote, 'you can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don't have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world. You don't have to do any science.' Between both philosophies, the issue at hand is the fundamental source of human knowledge and the proper techniques for verifying what we think we know. Whereas both philosophies are under the umbrella of epistemology, their argument lies in the understanding of the warrant, which is under the wider epistemic umbrella of the theory of justification. The theory of justification is the part of epistemology that attempts to understand the justification of propositions and beliefs. Epistemologists are concerned with various epistemic features of belief, which include the ideas of justification, warrant, rationality, and probability. Of these four terms, the term that has been most widely used and discussed by the early 21st century is 'warrant'. Loosely speaking, justification is the reason that someone (probably) holds a belief. If 'A' makes a claim, and 'B' then casts doubt on it, 'A''s next move would normally be to provide justification. The precise method one uses to provide justification is where the lines are drawn between rationalism and empiricism (among other philosophical views). Much of the debate in these fields are focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification.