[New Entry by Peter West, Kevin Lower, Natalia Strok, Pedro Pricladnitzky, Fabio Malfara, Manuel Fasko, and Christopher P. Noble on April 17, 2026.]
The expression ‘rationalism’ is a historiographical category that refers to a set of views more or less shared by a number of philosophers active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This period saw the heyday of metaphysical system-building, but the expression ‘rationalism’, as the term is understood in this entry, connotes primarily epistemological commitments. Since the early twentieth century, ‘rationalism’ has typically been presented in contrast with ’empiricism’. By contrast to…

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