The early modern philosophical tradition, developed primarily by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, that holds reason rather than sensory experience as the primary source of knowledge about the world. Rationalists believe that fundamental truths about reality, morality, and politics can be discovered through pure reasoning from self-evident principles, and they are generally skeptical of claims that knowledge must be grounded in observation. Rationalism was the dominant alternative to British empiricism in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Kant's critical philosophy was a sustained attempt to synthesize the two traditions.
Tradition
Rationalism
The philosophical tradition that holds reason rather than sensory experience is the primary source of knowledge and moral truth.
Thinkers
Thinker
Baruch Spinoza
1632–1677
Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch-Jewish rationalist and early theorist of liberal toleration whose radical pantheism and defense of free thought made him the most dangerous thinker of the 17th century
ThinkerRené Descartes
1596–1650
René Descartes was a rationalist whose own politics were cautiously conservative, yet whose method of systematic doubt armed every later tradition that grounds political legitimacy in reason rather than inherited authority
Related through shared thinkers