School · 11 thinkers
Rationalism
11 thinkers of Rationalism on the Agora star map, from René Descartes to Emanuel Swedenborg, in chronological order.
- 1596–1650René Descartes
Doubt everything you can, and one thing remains certain – that you, who are thinking, exist – and mind and body are two different kinds of thing.
- 1612–1694Antoine Arnauld
Clear thinking needs a method for ideas, judgements and inferences; an idea is not a thing between the mind and the world but the mind’s own perception of its object.
- 1618–1680Elisabeth of Bohemia
If the soul has no body, how can it move the body? Her question to Descartes remains the classic objection to splitting mind from matter.
- 1623–1673Margaret Cavendish
All of nature is matter that senses, moves and thinks by itself – there is no immaterial mind and no lifeless mechanism.
- 1623–1662Blaise Pascal
Humans are both wretched and great, reason cannot settle the deepest questions, and the heart has reasons of its own.
- 1631–1679Anne Conway
All creatures are made of one living spiritual substance in different degrees, so there is no sharp divide between mind and body.
- 1632–1677Baruch de Spinoza
God and nature are one and the same, everything happens by necessity, and freedom means understanding that necessity instead of fighting it.
- 1638–1715Nicolas Malebranche
Created things cannot really cause anything; God alone acts on every occasion, and we know the world by seeing ideas in God.
- 1646–1716Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The world is made of countless simple mind-like units, nothing happens without a reason, and God chose the best of all possible worlds.
- 1679–1754Christian Wolff
Wolff held that philosophy is the science of all that is possible, insofar as it can be, and must proceed like mathematics from clear definitions and the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason; morality follows from human nature and the duty to perfect oneself, knowable by reason without revelation.
- 1688–1772Emanuel Swedenborg
For Swedenborg, everything natural corresponds to something spiritual, and the spiritual world flows into the visible one; Scripture has an inner sense about the soul’s rebirth, and heaven and hell are states that people choose through what they love.