Rationalism (Europe, 17th Century) Rationalism, championed by 17th-century European philosophers like René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, asserts that reason—not sensory experience—is the primary source of knowledge. Descartes’ famous “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) launched modern philosophy by grounding certainty in the thinking self. Rationalists believed innate ideas and deductive logic could reveal truths about God, the soul, and the cosmos, much like mathematics. Spinoza constructed an entire metaphysical system from axioms, viewing God and Nature as one substance; Leibniz proposed a universe of harmonious “monads.” Opposed to empiricism (e.g., Locke), rationalism trusted the mind’s capacity to grasp universal, necessary truths independently of observation. Though later challenged by Kant and scientific empiricism, its legacy endures in mathematics, theoretical physics, and AI—fields where abstract reasoning leads discovery. Rationalism elevated human intellect as a mirror of divine order, inspiring confidence in logic’s power to unveil reality’s hidden architecture. It remains foundational to debates about the limits of knowledge and the role of intuition in understanding the world.
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