O rationalism is philosophical theory which gives priority to reason, like faculty of knowledge with respect to the senses.
Rationalism can be divided into different strands: the strand metaphysics, which finds a rational character in reality and indicates that the world is logically ordered and subject to laws; the shed epistemological or gnosiological, which sees reason as the source of all true knowledge, independent of experience; and the strand ethic, which emphasizes the relevance of rationality, respectively, to moral action.
The principles of reason that make knowledge and moral judgment possible are innate and converge in the capacity of human knowledge ("natural lumen").
The defense of reason and the preponderance of this philosophical current became the ideology of the French Enlightenment and, in the religious context, it created a critical attitude towards revelation, which culminated in the defense of a religion Natural.
Christian rationalism
Christian rationalism consists of a spiritualist philosophy systematized by Luís de Matos and which emerged thanks to a separation from the Brazilian Spiritist movement. Followers of this doctrine assert that Christian rationalism is a science and not a religion, and objective to address the evolution of the human spirit, reaching conclusions about phenomena and matters such as reason and reasoning.
Rationalism and Empiricism
Unlike empiricism, rationalism accepts the existence of innate truths and truths "a priori". I. Kant performed a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, maintaining as a reference for all knowledge the given in experience and affirming at the same time the existence of forms "a priori" in the subject.
Descartes' rationalism
As a philosophical current, rationalism was born with Descartes, and reached its peak in B. Spinoza, G. W. Leibniz and Ch. Wolff. Cartesian rationalism indicates that it is only possible to reach knowledge of the Truth through the reason of the human being.
For Descartes, there were three categories of ideas: the adventitious, at factitious and the innate. Adventitias represent ideas that arise through data obtained by our senses; factitious are the ideas that originate in our imagination; and the innate ideas, which do not depend on experience and are within us since we are born. According to Descartes, mathematical concepts and the notion of the existence of God were examples of innate ideas.
