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The three great historical philosophers most often associated with rationalism - Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz - opened up ingenious and breathtaking vistas upon the world. Yet their works are so difficult that readers often find themselves stymied. ""Understanding Rationalism"" offers a guide for anyone approaching these thinkers for the first time.With clear explanations, elegant examples and insightful summaries, ""Understanding Rationalism"" unlocks their intricate metaphysical systems, which are by turns surprising, compelling and sometimes bizarre. It also lays out their controversial s

Much recent political thought has been devoted to the proposition that neither political endeavor properly understood nor theorizing about such endeavor is or could ever be a kind of rational activity. I examine three broad approaches that celebrate, respectively, rhetorical practices of political persuasion, agonistic conceptions of democracy, and, more generally, a kind of hard-headed critical realism rooted in the plain facts of political life. I argue that criticisms of rationalism in politics associated with these approaches systematically ignore central tenets of what might be called a post-Kantian convergence of recent and important philosophical perspectives and that such perspectives can be enormously useful in addressing and critically evaluating the underlying intellectual structures of political life.

This chapter traces Oakeshott's inquiry on human knowledge in relation to the impacts of rationalism on human knowing which the philosopher characterized as a type of mental infection & belief about knowledge that has progressively infected European life & politics since the early seventeenth century. Rationalism's separation of intellect & will corrupts through a politics of perfection, transforming everything into doctrine. Rationalism has reduced education, morality & religion to skill training rather than to creativity, the pursuit of happiness rather than reflection, & corruption stemming from ideas detached from the flow of activity. Oakeshott & the rationalist differ further in the location of discontents of their civilization: an Oakeshottian perspective on discontents claims they form the transitory character of human life is in contrast to the rationalist claims that discontent is a response to the present arrangements of society leading to change. Rationalist projects' detachment from experience suppresses human understanding of the accumulated tradition of things, & misleads through overblown expectations of future benefits. 3 References. J. Harwell

"Politics is, at its core, a kind of activity, a particular type of doing. It comprises a distinctive and varied repertoire of human practices that we regularly characterize as political and that we think of as somehow defining the essence of public life. One might say that specific forms of political engagement are to politics as batting, throwing, catching and running are to baseball. They constitute, in effect, the sum and substance of the enterprise"--

"Rationalism and Security" published on by Oxford University Press.

A brief survey of the historical development of rationalism is made. It is shown that neither rationalism nor empiricism satisfy Aristotle's postulates for a science. The development of mathematical statistics shows a direct concern with the relation between theory and observation. Results to date suggest that Aristotle's postulates do not yield a suitable characterization of science. It is concluded that any system of rationalism suitable for science will share the following characteristics with mathematical statistics; (1) basic concepts will involve both theoretical and empirical entities, (2) some aspects of the rationalism will he developed empirically, and (3) some aspects of the rationalism will be developed by "elimination" of "true values" from "self-evident" mathematics. New systems of scientific rationalism may differ from mathematical statistics by (1) prohibiting the use of the "excluded middle," (2) replacing, or reformulating, the probability concept, and (3) relaxing the requirement of indefinite repetition of experiments.