A Companion to Rationalism

The rationalist impulse has guided Western philosophical thought from its beginnings in ancient Greece to the present day. In this Companion , a cast of established and rising stars in philosophy lays out the historical roots, the celebrated expressions, the controversies, and the contemporary determinations of rationalist thought. The volume opens with essays examining the nature of the rationalist impulse to philosophize, and the distinction between rationalism and empiricism. The focus of the remainder of the volume is on the “golden age” of rationalism in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. However, this is set in the context of its historical development and the appearance of rationalist themes in recent thought. The material is organized chronologically, and various philosophical methods and viewpoints are represented throughout.

List of Contributors ix Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations xii Introduction xiv Part I The Core of Rationalism 1 1 The Rationalist Impulse 3 Alan Nelson 2 The Rationalist Conception of Substance 12 Thomas M. Lennon 3 Rationalist Theories of Sense Perception and Mind–Body Relation 31 Gary Hatfield 4 Rationalism and Education 61 David Cunning Part II The Historical Background 83 5 Plato’s Rationalistic Method 85 Hugh H. Benson 6 Rationalism in Jewish Philosophy 100 Steven Nadler 7 Early Modern Critiques of Rationalist Psychology 119 Antonia LoLordo 8 Rationalism and Method 137 Matthew J. Kisner 9 Cartesian Imaginations: The Method and Passions of Imagining 156 Dennis L. Sepper Part III The Heyday of Rationalism 177 10 Descartes’ Rationalist Epistemology 179 Lex Newman 11 Rationalism and Representation 206 Kurt Smith 12 The Role of the Imagination in Rationalist Philosophies of Mathematics 224 Lawrence Nolan 13 Idealism and Cartesian Motion 250 Alice Sowaal 14 Leibniz on Shape and the Cartesian Conception of Body 262 Timothy Crockett 15 Leibniz on Modality, Cognition, and Expression 282 Alan Nelson 16 Rationalist Moral Philosophy 302 Andrew Youpa 17 Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Rationalist Reconceptions of Imagination 322 Dennis L. Sepper 18 Kant and the Two Dogmas of Rationalism 343 Henry E. Allison Part IV Rationalist Themes in Contemporary Philosophy 361 19 Rationalism in the Phenomenological Tradition 363 David Woodruff Smith 20 Rationalist Elements of Twentieth–Century Analytic Philosophy 379 Paul Livingston 21 Proust and the Rationalist Conception of the Self 399 Alan Nelson 22 Rationalism in Science 408 David Stump 23 Rational Decision Making: Descriptive, Prescriptive, or Explanatory? 425 Jonathan Michael Kaplan 24 What is a Feminist to do with Rational Choice? 450 Mariam Thalos 25 Rationalism in the Philosophy of Donald Davidson 468 Richard N. Manning Index 488

Alan Nelson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a leading scholar of the great philosophical systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has published widely on rationalism in the history of philosophy and in the philosophy of science.