O rationalismit was onephilosophical current very important of Modernity. As a conception of philosophical knowledge, rationalism begins to take shape during the Renaissance, but its first origins can be traced back to Greek philosophy, with the idealist theses platonic and the conception of the principle of causality.
Rationalism has as main aim to theorize the way of knowing human beings, not accepting any empirical element as a source of true knowledge. For rationalists, all the ideas we have originate in pure rationality, which also imposes an innate conception, that is, that the ideas have innate origins in human beings, being born with us in our intellect and being used and discovered by people who make the best use of the reason. Are considered rationalist philosophers discards, Spinoza and Leibniz.
See more: Modern Philosophy: the period in the history of philosophy in which rationalism stood out
Characteristics of rationalism
As epistemology (philosophical strand that investigates the theories of knowledge), rationalism asserts that all human knowledge comes from pure rationality and of the intellect. Practical experiences, for rationalists, have no cognitive value and can even deceive us by giving us erroneous impressions. Rationalists argue that ideas arise from pure and simple rational capacity and drive the intellect, forming knowledge based on the universal laws of reason.
rationalism admits the innate thesis, which argues that knowledge starts from innate impressions that accompany all human beings, who are endowed with rational capacity since their birth. The explanation for why some have more advanced knowledge than others is provided by the development of innate abilities via rational exercises, that is, some people are more intelligent, skillful or know a lot about a certain subject because they strove and exercised their intellect, discovering in it the ideas that were always contained there.
For rationalists, reason is composed of a set of universal laws that make up all rational knowledge, and everything outside of it is wrong knowledge. Because it is based on this set of rational laws, this epistemological theory adopts deduction as the main philosophical method and find in mathematics a support for the defense of their theories. Rationalist philosophers such as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were also mathematicians.
See too: Differences between humans and other animals
Rationalism and Renaissance
It's in the Renaissance context that rationalist ideas begin to gain strength in Europe. Defending a return to the ideals of Ancient Greece and an appreciation of human knowledge, the renaissanceists operated a significant revolutioncultural in your time. Inventions from the period, such as the press, also boosted the desire to know.
Science starts to become more specific and reveals new discoveries in the passage from Renaissance to Modernity, which places the following question at the center of philosophical discussions: how is knowledge possible? This questioning, which arises at the beginning of Modernity due to the Renaissance intellectual development, gives rise to the epistemology or theory of knowledge, having as its main divisions, during this period, rationalism and the empiricism.
rationalism and empiricism
In Modernity, the debate between rationalists and empiricists intensified. while the empiricists claimed that all human knowledge comes from experience and that ideas only arise in our minds after the experiences, the rationalists claim that true human knowledge is purely intellectual and that cognitive structures they function separately from corporeal structures, even admitting the existence of innate ideas.
Rene Descartes he was one of the leading modern rationalists. His work was the object of contestation and attempts at refutation by the empiricist Locke, in your book Essay on human understanding. Another British empiricist, David Hume, writes another book with a similar title, which was translated into Portuguese as Essay on human understanding or how Research on human knowledge, which seems like a better translation.
Later, the German rationalist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz he writes another text defending rationalism, in which he criticizes Descartes' position, tries to refute the British empiricists, and founds a theory of knowledge called monadology.
THE solution to the long struggle between empiricists and rationalists seems to be offered by Immanuel Kant, representative of Enlightenment German, who founds a theory of knowledge doubly based on rationalist and empiricist elements.
See too: René Descartes and the hyperbolic doubt
rationalist philosophers
As is tradition in the history of philosophy, several different ideas they were put forward by the rationalists, creating a cycle of theories and rebuttals between them. The main rationalist philosophers and their ideas are listed below:
Baruch de Spinoza
Spinoza was the son of a family of Portuguese origin, but who lived in Holland. Also of Jewish origin, the Dutch thinker, dedicated to the study of philosophy and theology from a young age, he developed theses about the existence of God which shocked the Dutch Jewish community and yielded their expulsion from Amsterdam.
His rationalist conception defended the separation of matter, intellect and rationality, based on what he called immanent and transcendent. His problem with the Jewish authorities arose because he claimed that God was immanent and therefore materially present in nature. The thinker wrote, among other books: Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, Intellect Amendment Treaty (his main rationalist work), and political theological treatise.
Rene Descartes
author of Method speech it's from Philosophical Meditations, the French philosopher and mathematician can be considered the first great rationalist. His defense of rationalism is so great that the cogito Cartesian admits as the first and best-founded knowledge: the recognition of existence based on the act of thinking and not on living.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The German philosopher and mathematician was a prodigy in his studies, having defended his doctoral thesis at the age of 20 and worked for most of his life as a diplomat. Leibniz bases universal knowledge on rationality through what he called monads. Monads would be separate and fragmented entities that came together (like the atoms) to give rise to rational knowledge.
The existence of monads is, for the philosopher, only conceptual. They are just a resource Leibniz used to explain the origin of knowledge. His advanced studies in mathematics allowed him to develop infinitesimal calculus. Among his books, we can highlight: theodicy and Monadology.
by Francisco Porfirio
Philosophy teacher
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/filosofia/racionalismo.htm