Thread: JA:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/17681
Peircers, I'm sure we all learned in one place or another that Locke, Berkeley, and Hume belonged to a group called “The Empiricists” while Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz belonged to a group called “The Rationalists”, where “empiricism” and “rationalism” were described or exemplified as positions or tendencies the former and the latter, respectively, bore in common. That's all very pat, and pat enough to content the mind for a time, but if one gets the idea that thinkers split in their practices as cleanly and deeply as gradgrinds teach undergrads to categorize their thought then that would be a mistake. Consulting my Runes, I find the following definition. <QUOTE> Rationalism: A method, or very broadly, a theory of philosophy, in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive. Usually associated with an attempt to introduce mathematical methods into philosophy, as in Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. (Vernon J. Bourke) The history of rationalism begins with the Eleatics (q.v.), Pythagoreans, and Plato (q.v.) whose theory of the self-sufficiency of reason became the leitmotif of neo-Platonism and idealism (q.v.). </QUOTE> I will try to remember that people still attach those meanings to the word “rationalism” but I'm pretty sure I never thought of empiricism and rationalism as “never the twain shall meet” ways of approaching the world. So I'll take a cue from the passage that Clark quoted, and call the brand of rationalism that Peirce deprecated by the name of “philosophical rationalism”. Personally, I have never found much use for it, but I don't have much use for any ism that is taken to such extremes that it become a religion, so there is nothing very surprising about that. Regards, Jon -- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache
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