Rationalism

Rationalism is the view that reason or intellectual insight has a primary role in acquiring knowledge. In its modern philosophical form, it holds that some knowledge is independent of sensory experience.

A priori and a posteriori: A distinction between knowledge justified independently of experience and knowledge justified through experience. Rationalists treat some knowledge as a priori rather than derived from sensation.
René Descartes: A seventeenth-century French philosopher who developed a rationalist system grounded in methodic doubt and clear, distinct ideas. His project made reason a route to certainty despite doubt about the senses.
Methodic doubt: A procedure that provisionally rejects any belief that can be doubted in order to find a secure foundation. Descartes uses it to test whether reason can uncover certainty beneath uncertain experience.
British empiricism: A philosophical tradition associated with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume that gives experience a central role in knowledge. Its account of ideas and evidence opposes rationalist appeals to innate or a priori knowledge.
Cartesian dualism: Descartes's view that mind and body are distinct kinds of substance, one thinking and the other extended. His rationalist account of the thinking self helped motivate this influential mind–body distinction.
Innate ideas: Ideas or principles held to be present in the mind independently of learning from experience. The doctrine offers one explanation for how the mind can possess knowledge beyond sensory input.
Baruch Spinoza: A Dutch philosopher who presented a monistic metaphysics and ethics through a geometric style of demonstration. His system shows rationalism extending deductive method to reality and human life.
Cogito: Descartes's inference that the act of thinking establishes the thinker's existence. It is his first claimed certainty reached through reflection rather than sensory evidence.
David Hume: A Scottish philosopher who argued that human knowledge of matters of fact depends on experience and questioned necessary causal inference. His skepticism presses rationalism to explain whether reason can establish claims about the world.
Continental rationalism: The early modern philosophical tradition associated especially with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. It names the historical school in which these rationalist systems took shape.

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