Quotes About Rationalism

In the seventeenth century, René Descartes opted for reason over a divine source of knowledge. This came to be known as putting Descartes before the source.

Civilised man does not discover gods, he discards them.

Even in times of the most entrenched rationalism, there lives in every man a little Alexander who never managed to conquer his Eudaimon Arabia.

Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as incredible as theology.

There is no more terrifying experience for a Christian than to discover he has suddenly become a rationalist.

Newton's influence on science particularly and on eighteenth century culture in general was profound.  Few scientists after him would deny themselves the identity of being a "Newtonian", while his (apparent) application of rational thought to the solution of scientific problems became the model for the Enlightenment embrace of "rationalism".

For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.

In spite of rationalism's disdain for the particular, the personal, and the unwholesome [the modern debunker's anecdotal], the drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious. We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.

Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm.

It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now.

the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions.

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

A partir de estas definiciones, Spinoza procede por medio de pruebas euclidianas a construir un sistema determinista e irrefutable que abarca todo el universo.

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.

As Jay Griffiths observes in her book Wild, René Descartes and the rationalists of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cultivated "a hatred of 'enthusiasm,' for its emotional, wild surges of knowing were too natural, too bodily, too animal. Rationalism demanded superiority to, and separation from, nature and nature's ways of knowing.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

The key principle of Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology is constructivism. Constructivism rejects old-fashioned rationalism: Knowledge is not made out of special knowledge-parts preformed in each individual knower at birth. It also rejects empiricism: Knowledge does not consist of epistemic pieces impressed on the knower by the environment, whether physical or social. Instead, the knower has to construct knowledge.

the Enlightenment has been held responsible for the evils of the modern age, and much scorn has been directed at its supposed superficial rationalism, foolish optimism, and irresponsible Utopianism.

Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.

It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.

That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt....but although our knowledge originates WITH experience, it does not all arise OUT OF experience.