Rationalism
The catalogue includes 12 thinkers in Rationalism.
How these pages are made
Each school page lists the thinkers in our catalogue who belong to this tradition (primary school or recorded affiliation). Dates, works and bios come from the same catalogue as the app. We do not write original essays about the school.
Thinkers in this tradition
- René Descartes1596 – 1650
Rene Descartes (1596–1650) is considered the father of modern Western philosophy. Seeking certainty in an age shaken by the Scientific Revolution, he developed a method of radical doubt. His famous 'I think, therefore I…
- Hugo Grotius1583 – 1645
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was a Dutch jurist and philosopher, the founder of modern natural law and international law. His On the Law of War and Peace argued that even between sovereign states there are obligations of…
- Isaiah Berlin1909 – 1997
Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was a Riga-born British philosopher and historian of ideas, founding President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and the most-cited modern thinker on freedom. His Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) drew…
- Karl Popper1902 – 1994
Karl Popper (1902–1994) was a Vienna-born British philosopher of science and politics, professor at the London School of Economics. He gave us falsifiability — the idea that what makes a claim scientific is not that it…
- Hans-Georg Gadamer1900 – 2002
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) was a German philosopher whose Truth and Method (1960) became the foundational text of philosophical hermeneutics. He argued that understanding is never neutral: we approach a text, a…
- Jürgen Habermasb. 1929
Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist of the Frankfurt School, the most influential living theorist of the public sphere. He argues that legitimate political and moral norms are those…
- Theodor W. Adorno1903 – 1969
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, and core figure of the Frankfurt School. With Max Horkheimer he wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, an unsparing diagnosis of how…
- Walter Benjamin1892 – 1940
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, literary critic, and one of the most original European voices of the early twentieth century, associated with the Frankfurt School. The Work of Art in the Age…
- Ernst Cassirer1874 – 1945
Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) was a German neo-Kantian philosopher, historian of ideas, and the great twentieth-century defender of the Enlightenment. His Philosophy of Symbolic Forms read science, language, myth, and art…
- Giambattista Vico1668 – 1744
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was a Neapolitan philosopher of history whose New Science (1725, 1744) proposed the most radical thesis of the early modern period: we can know history because we made it, while we can…
- Christian Wolff1679 – 1754
Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was a German rationalist who systematised and expanded Leibniz's philosophy into the dominant school of the German Enlightenment. Writing in German rather than Latin, he forged much of the…
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz1646 – 1716
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was a German polymath who invented calculus independently of Newton and devised the binary arithmetic underlying modern computing. In the Monadology he described reality as…