Main Features Of Rationalism Essay

Rationalism has four main features:

1. The principle of sufficient reason

Every fact has an explanation: there are no inexplicable facts. There is a reason (or cause) for everything. For every existence and non-existence things there must be assigned a cause, or reason. For example, if a tree exists, there must be a reason or cause why it exists; but if it doesn’t exist, there must also be a reason or cause which prevents it from existing, or which takes its existence away.

2. The priority of reason (or intellect)

This can be expressed in various forms:

We can know some propositions in a particular subject area by intuition alone, or by deducting them from intuited propositions.

- Some knowledge (or some concepts) is innate: We know some truths (or concepts) as part of our rational nature.

- What we know by intuition and deduction, or what we know natively, we could not know through sense experience: reason is

indispensable for knowledge.

3. The possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge

A Kantian characterization: we can acquire non-trivial (non-analytical) or substantial knowledge about the world in a way that is independent of, or prior to, experience (e.g., Descartes argues a priori that external bodies exist, Sixth Meditation, ¶10)

4. The importance of method

We need a method if we are to investigate the truth of things … By a ‘method’ we mean reliable rules which are easy to apply, and such that if one follows them exactly, will never take what is false to be genuine or unproductively use one's mental endeavors, however will step by step and continually build one's information until one lands at a genuine comprehension of everything inside of one's ability.

Rationalistic philosophers accept that the truth is not exclusively controlled by what we can see.

They accept sense experience is relative and evolving. These philosophers guarantee that you require motivation to deal with what is appearance from reality and they deny that sense experience is the main wellspring of information about reality. Rationalistic scholars accept that thoughts like the laws of rationale, the idea of equity and the thought of God are as of now contained profound inside of the psyche and just should be conveyed to the level of our mindfulness. With this way of thinking we see weaknesses and strengths of Rationalism. The weakness is if we rely only on a reason and ignore sense experience we will start questioning everything ‘is it truly real or just illusion?’ it would cause side effect in our existence. It will effect negatively our mind and the way our thinking. The strength side in my opinion that it helps to distinguish past tangible experience from coherent

reasoning.