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

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.

“Addressing topics from epistemology and metaphysics to ethics and psychology, it is the most compete treatment of the subject known to me.” “I can recommend this book without hesitation.” ( Philosophy In Review ) "This companion is large indeed, but the size fits the largeness of its subjects; and it does succeed in its 25 articles in covering that subject . . . A job well done. Recommended." (Choice)