Word Finder - rationalism

definition

The theory that the reason is a source of knowledge independent of and superior to sense perception.

definition

The theory that knowledge may be derived by deductions from a priori concepts (such as axioms, postulates or earlier deductions).

definition

A view that the fundamental method for problem solving is through reason and experience rather than faith, inspiration, revelation, intuition or authority.

definition

Elaboration of theories by use of reason alone without appeal to experience, such as in mathematical systems.

It is evident that he carried rationalism in religion to an extent that seems hardly consistent with his position as a priest of the English Church.

Up to the revolutionary year 1830 his religious views had remained strongly tinged with rationalism, Hegel remaining his guide in religion as in practical politics and the treatment of history.

His critical principles are explained in the preface, where he dwells on the necessity of starting as much as possible from trustworthy contemporary sources, or at least from those nearest to antiquity - the touchstone by which verbal traditions can be tested being contemporary poems. He inclines to rationalism, rejecting the marvellous and recasting legends containing it in a more historical spirit; but he makes an exception in the accounts of the introduction of Christianity into Norway and of the national saint St Olaf.

The creeds and confessions do not formulate any authoritative doctrine of angels; and modern rationalism has tended to deny the existence of such beings, or to regard the subject as one on which we can have no certain knowledge.

His philosophical standpoint may be characterized as a reaction from the pantheistic tendency of Hegel's idealistic rationalism towards a more pronouncedly theistic position.

In his twenty-sixth year, believing himself to be a divinely-commissioned prophet, he began to preach in his native parish and afterwards throughout Norway, calling people to repentance and attacking rationalism.

Benn (History of English Rationalism in the zgth Cent.) goes beyond ordinary usage in defining rationalism as a militant theory opposed to all belief in God.

It is modern misanthropy that diminishes Osmond's soul, not scientific rationalism.

His chief pupil, Johann Salomo Semler, is sometimes called the father of German rationalism.

But he does not follow his idea into the details of human duty, though he passes in review fatalism, mysticism, pantheism, scepticism, egotism, sentimentalism and rationalism.

The germs of Rationalism were unquestionably present in several of Abelard's opinions, and still more so, the traditionalists must have thought, in his general attitude towards theological questions.

Anselm had made an elaborate employment of reason in the interest of faith, but the spirit of pious subordination which had marked the demonstrations of Anselm seemed wanting in the argumentations of this bolder and more restless spirit; and the church, or at least an influential section of it, took alarm at the encroachments of Rationalism.

And even the proposal to apply the unaided reason to solve questions which had divided the fathers must have been resented by the more rigid churchmen as the rash intrusion of an over-confident Rationalism.

The number of questions which Calvin failed to ask or eluded by absolutely irrational expedients frees him from any taint of modern rationalism.

His court at Palermo had been one of the most brilliant in Europe, and attracted learned men from all over the then known world; his somewhat pagan philosophy was afterwards regarded as marking the beginnings of modern rationalism.

To the orthodox theology of Greece and Rome the system stood in a twofold relation, as criticism and rationalism.

Many of the leaders of the revolutionary movement were deists, though it is quite false to say that the extreme methods of the movement were the result of widespread rationalism.

He then attached himself to the Old Lutheran party, interpreting Lutheranism in a broad and liberal spirit and showing some appreciation of rationalism.

The importance of Semler, sometimes called "the father of German rationalism," in the history of theology and the human mind is that of a critic of biblical and ecclesiastical documents and of the history of dogmas.

There is an ethical rationalism which can never be wholly suppressed in the Christian Church by the Pauline or Augustinian soteriology.

It disengages itself in the 17th century as Socinianism and in the 18th as Rationalism or Deism.

The third period, beginning about 1885, has been one of rationalism, recognition of universal religion, large acceptance of the scientific method and ideas and an ethical attempt to realize the higher affirmations of Christianity.

The aim of the work was to reform Protestant theology by means of the fundamental ideas of the Reden, to put an end to the unreason and superficiality of both supernaturalism and rationalism, and to deliver religion and theology from a relation of dependence on perpetually changing systems of philosophy.

Agnosticism, Phenomenalism, Rationalism, Materialism all manifest the positivist spirit, denying what may be succinctly described as the metempirical.

The misunderstanding of his position led to the publication in 1830 of a second part of Pusey's Historical Enquiry, in which he denied the charge of rationalism.

The doctrine of knowledge expressed in the Dissertation was the final form which the Wolffian rationalism could assume for him, and, though many of the elements of the Kritik are contained therein, it was not really in advance of the Wolffian theory.

Kant, indeed, was mainly influenced by his strong opposition to the Leibnitzian rationalism, and therefore assigns the categories to understanding, the logical faculty, without consideration of the question, - which might have been suggested by the previous statements of the Dissertation, - what relation these categories held to the empirical notions formed by comparison, abstraction and generalization when directed upon representations of objects.

In the Grammar, Newman makes his case for a radically new understanding of human reason, rejecting both Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism.

Like Dawkins, Randi is an inspiration to everyone who searches for truth and applies rationalism to solving life's mysteries.

Did it promote rationalism rather than faith seeking understanding?

Ultimately she did not succeed in broadening definitions of femininity to include rationalism and mathematical accomplishment.

Natural languages are not designed; they are the products mainly of evolutionary rather than constructive rationalism.

But I suspect that my next example of evolutionary rationalism - modern science - may be much more contentious.

For a long time it had seemed that scientific rationalism would take the lead.

It is keener with critical rationalism, perhaps, rather than unique to it.

Of course, the problem with pure rationalism is that finding a secure starting point from which to develop our beliefs is difficult.

However, it does not ward off the threat to ethical rationalism.

The answer seemed to be that it was the logic of enlightenment rationalism itself that gave rise to such barbarism.

In his design Baskerville clearly expressed the aesthetical ideas of neoclassicism and 18th century rationalism.

Pericles also incurred unpopularity because of his rationalism in religious matters; yet Athens in his time was becoming ripe for the new culture, and would have done better to receive it from men of his circle - Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras and Meton - than from the more irresponsible sophists.

Lauder's charge of plagiarism (1750), attacking David Hume's rationalism in his Criterion of Miracles (1752), and the Hutchinsonians in his Apology for the Clergy (1755).

It is first of all a system of complete rationalism; it is assumed, in other words, that reason is capable of mapping out the whole system of things.

He borrows from Kant's "rationalism " the hypothesis of a spontaneous activity of the subject with the deduction that knowledge begins from sense, but arises from understanding; and he accepts from Kant's metaphysical idealism the consequence that everything we perceive, experience and know about physical nature, and the bodies of which it consists, is phenomena, and not bodily things in themselves.

Thoroughgoing rationalism, on the other hand, either categorically denies that the supernatural or the infinite - whether it exist or not - can be the object of human knowledge (see Agnosticism), or else, in the mouth of a single person, states that he at least has no such knowledge.

This rationalism within the Church was a theological manifestation of the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment (Aufklarung), and must be studied in close connexion with the purely philosophical rationalism already discussed.

His work contained a measure of rationalism sufficient to arouse the suspicion of orthodox theologians, without making any valuable addition to, or modification of, the underlying doctrine.

In the protest against the scheme of "judging truth by counting noses," Shaftesbury recognized the danger of the standard which seemed to satisfy many deists; and in almost every respect he has more in common with those who afterwards, in Germany, annihilated the pretensions of complacent rationalism than with the rationalists themselves.

From these sources they attempted to evolve a philosophy of religion, which would not only refute the views of Hobbes, but would also free theology finally from the errors of scholasticism, without plunging it in the newer dangers of unfettered rationalism (see ETHIcs).

Reluctantly his father gave him permission to leave Barby for the university of Halle, which had already (1787) abandoned pietism and adopted the rationalist spirit of Wolf and Semler (see RATIONALism).

The appearance of the Saviour in human history is therefore as a divine revelation neither absolutely supernatural nor absolutely beyond reason, and the controversy of the 18th century between the rationalists and supernaturalists rests on false grounds, leads to wrong issues, and each party is right and wrong (see Rationalism).