The expression ‘rationalism’ is a historiographical category that refers to a set of views more or less shared by a number of philosophers active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This period saw the heyday of metaphysical system-building, but the expression ‘rationalism’, as the term is understood in this entry, connotes primarily epistemological commitments. Since the early twentieth century, ‘rationalism’ has typically been presented in contrast with ‘empiricism’. By contrast to so…
Read moreThe expression ‘rationalism’ is a historiographical category that refers to a set of views more or less shared by a number of philosophers active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This period saw the heyday of metaphysical system-building, but the expression ‘rationalism’, as the term is understood in this entry, connotes primarily epistemological commitments. Since the early twentieth century, ‘rationalism’ has typically been presented in contrast with ‘empiricism’. By contrast to so-called ‘empiricism’, which traces (all) knowledge to sensory experience, ‘rationalists’ tend to rely upon the powers of reason to explain and justify what we know.
This entry provides an account of the traditional narrative of early modern ‘rationalism’ while also extending that narrative to cover figures from typically under-represented backgrounds who hold commitments that can also plausibly be characterized as ‘rationalist’. The entry thus covers René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), alongside Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703–1759), Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), and Anne Conway (1631–1679). The entry also concludes by briefly suggesting future directions for scholarship on early modern rationalism involving the application of rationalist principles in topics such as social and political philosophy, as illustrated through the writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1645–1695) and François Poulain de la Barre (1647–1723).
