By Movement / School > Modern > Rationalism

Rationalism is a philosophical movement which gathered momentum during the Age of Reason of the 17th Century. It is usually associated with the introduction of mathematical methods into philosophy during this period by the major rationalist figures,Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza. The preponderance of French Rationalists in the 18th Century Age of Enlightenment, includingVoltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu) (1689 - 1755), is often known as French Rationalism.
Rationalism is any view appealing to intellectual and deductive reason (as opposed to sensory experience or any religious teachings) as the source of knowledge or justification. Thus, it holds that some propositions are knowable by us by intuitionalone, while others are knowable by being deduced through valid arguments from intuited propositions. It relies on the idea that reality has a rational structure in that all aspects of it can be grasped through mathematical and logical principles, and not simply through sensory experience.
Rationalists believe that, rather than being a "tabula rasa" to be imprinted with sense data, the mind is structured by, and responds to, mathematical methods of reasoning. Some of our knowledge or the concepts we employ are part of our innate rational nature: experiences may trigger a process by which we bring this knowledge to consciousness, but the experiences do not provide us with the knowledge itself, which has in some way been with us all along. See the section on the doctrine of Rationalism for more details.
Rationalism is usually contrasted with Empiricism (the view that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience and sensory perception), and it is often referred to as Continental Rationalism because it was predominant in the continental schools ofEurope, whereas British Empiricism dominated in Britain. However, the distinction between the two is perhaps not as clear-cutas is sometimes suggested, and would probably not have even been recognized by the philosophers involved. Although Rationalists asserted that, in principle, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be gained through the use of reason alone, they also observed that this was not possible in practice for human beings, except in specific areas such asmathematics.
It has some similarities in ideology and intent to the earlier Humanist movement in that it aims to provide a framework for philosophical discourse outside of religious or supernatural beliefs. But in other respects there is little to compare. While the roots of Rationalism may go back to the Eleatics and Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, or at least to Platonists and Neo-Platonists, the definitive formulation of the theory had to wait until the 17th Century philosophers of the Age of Reason.
René Descartes is one of the earliest and best known proponents of Rationalism, which is often known as Cartesianism (and followers of Descartes' formulation of Rationalism as Cartesians). He believed that knowledge of eternal truths (e.g. mathematics and the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the sciences) could be attained by reason alone, without the need for any sensory experience. Other knowledge (e.g. the knowledge of physics), required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method - a moderate rationalist position. For instance, his famous dictum "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am") is a conclusion reached a priori and not through an inference from experience. Descartes held that some ideas (innate ideas) come from God; others ideas are derived from sensory experience; and still others are fictitious (or created by the imagination). Of these, the only ideas which are certainly valid, according to Descartes, are those which are innate.
Baruch Spinoza expanded upon Descartes' basic principles of Rationalism. His philosophy centred on several principles, most of which relied on his notion that God is the only absolute substance (similar to Descartes' conception of God), and that substance is composed of two attributes, thought and extension. He believed that all aspects of the natural world (including Man) were modes of the eternal substance of God, and can therefore only be known through pure thought or reason.
Gottfried Leibniz attempted to rectify what he saw as some of the problems that were not settled by Descartes by combiningDescartes' work with Aristotle's notion of form and his own conception of the universe as composed of monads. He believed that ideas exist in the intellect innately, but only in a virtual sense, and it is only when the mind reflects on itself that those ideas are actualized.
Nicolas Malebranche is another well-known Rationalist, who attempted to square the Rationalism of René Descartes with his strong Christian convictions and his implicit acceptance of the teachings of St. Augustine. He posited that although humans attain knowledge through ideas rather than sensory perceptions, those ideas exist only in God, so that when we access them intellectually, we apprehend objective truth. His views were hotly contested by another Cartesian Rationalist and JensenistAntoine Arnauld (1612 - 1694), although mainly on theological grounds.

In the 18th Century, the great French rationalists of the Enlightenment (often known as French Rationalism) include Voltaire,Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu) (1689 - 1755). These philosophers produced some of the most powerful and influential political and philosophical writing in Western history, and had a defining influence on the subsequent history of Western democracy and Liberalism.

Immanuel Kant started as a traditional Rationalist, having studied Leibniz and Christian Wolff (1679 - 1754) but, after also studying the empiricist David Hume's works, he developed a distinctive and very influential Rationalism of his own, which attempted to synthesize the traditional rationalist and empiricist traditions.
During the middle of the 20th Century there was a strong tradition of organized Rationalism (represented in Britain by theRationalist Press Association, for example), which was particularly influenced by free thinkers and intellectuals. However, Rationalism in this sense has little in common with traditional Continental Rationalism, and is marked more by a reliance onempirical science. It accepted the supremacy of reason but insisted that the results be verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority

By Movement / School > Modern > Rationalism Spinoza

Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza
(Portrait, c. 1665)

Introduction

Baruch Spinoza (AKA Benedict Spinoza) (1623 - 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin who lived and worked during the Age of Reason.
Along with René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz, he is considered one of the greatRationalists of the 17th Century, although the breadth and importance of his work was not fully realized until years after his death.
An enormously controversial figure (both in his own day and after) for the highlyoriginal and provocative positions he advocated, Spinoza is nowadays respected as one of the definitive ethicists (he took a largely Moral Relativist position), and as a harbinger of enlightened modernity. His metaphysical views were essentiallymonistic and pantheistic, holding that God and Nature were just two names for the same single underlying reality.

Life

Spinoza was born on 24 November 1632 in Amsterdam, Holland, to a family ofSephardic Jews descended from displaced Maranos from Portugal. His father wasAbraão (Miguel) de Spinoza, a successful importer and merchant; his mother wasAna Débora, Miguel's second of three wives, who died when Baruch was only six years old.
He had a traditional Jewish upbringing, and his early education consisted mainly of religious study, including instruction in Hebrew, liturgy, Torah, prophetic writings and rabbinical commentaries. However, his critical, curious nature would soon come intoconflict with the Jewish community.
At the age of 17, when his father died in the wars against England and France and the family fortune was decimated, Spinoza was forced to cut short his formal studies to help run the family business, although he was eventually able to relinquish responsibility for the business and its debts to his brother, Gabriel, and devote himself to his real love, philosophy. He gave away his share of his father's inheritance to his sister, and lived the rest of his life in genteel poverty as a grinder of optical lenses.
In 1656, Spinoza was issued a writ of "cherem" (the Jewish equivalent of excommunication) for the apostasy of how he conceived God, and for various positions contrary to normative Jewish belief and his criticisms of the Talmud and other religious texts. He had reportedly been offered 1000 florins to keep quiet about his views, but had refused on principle. Following his excommunication, he adopted the first name Benedictus or Benedict (the Latin equivalent of Baruch, meaning "blessed") or, more informally, the Portuguese equivalent Bento.
After his excommunication, Spinoza lived and worked at times at the school of his old Latin teacher, Franciscus van den Enden, an atheist and devotee of the Rationalism of Descartes, who was forbidden by the city government to propagate his doctrines publicly. He dedicated himself completely to philosophy, and his fervent desire was to change the world through establishing a clandestine philosophical sect, although this was only eventually realized after his death, through the dedicated intercession of his friends.
He became acquainted with several Collegiants, members of an eclectic sect with tendencies towards Rationalism, as well as corresponding with Petrus Serrarius (1600 -1669), a radical Protestant and millennarian merchant, who acted as a patron of Spinoza for a time. By the beginning of the 1660s, Spinoza's name had become more widely known, and he met and corresponded with Gottfried Leibniz and Henry Oldenburg (1619 - 1677). Around 1661, he relocated from Amsterdam toRijnsburg (near Leiden) and later lived in Voorburg (1663) and then The Hague, earning a comfortable living from his work as an optician and lens-grinding, although he was also supported by small, but regular, donations from close friends. He never married, nor did he father any children.
Spinoza's first publication was a geometric exposition of the work of Descartes, the two part "Principia philosophiae cartesianae" ("Principles of Cartesian Philosophy"), published in 1663. In the early 1660s, he worked on what was to become his magnum opus, the "Ethics", but he suspended the work in 1665 in favour of his "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus"("Theologico-Political Treatise"), which was eventually published anonymously in 1670. The public reaction to this work, though, was extremely unfavourable and Spinoza was wary enough to abstain from publishing more of his works for the rest of his life (the "Ethics" and several other works were all published posthumously by his friends, in secrecy). Even his colleague Leibniz disagreed harshly with it (and published his own detailed refutation), although some of Leibniz's own work bears somestriking resemblances to certain key parts of Spinoza's philosophy. In 1676, Spinoza met with Leibniz at The Hague to privately discuss his "Ethics", which he had just completed but dared not publish.
Spinoza died at the young age of 44 on 21 February 1677 in The Hague, due to a lung illness (perhaps tuberculosis orsilicosis, possibly due to breathing in fine glass dust from the lenses he ground). Even after his death, Spinoza did not escapecontroversy, and in 1678 his works were banned throughout Holland.

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Although he is usually counted, along with Descartes and Leibniz, as one of the three major Rationalists of the 17th Century, his writings reveal the influence of such divergent sources as Stoicism, Jewish Rationalism, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes and a variety of heterodox religious thinkers of his day, and he made significant contributions in virtually every area of philosophy. His pursuits were eclectic and his thought was strikingly original, which makes him somewhat difficult to categorize.
His first published work, the "Principia philosophiae cartesianae" ("Principles of Cartesian Philosophy") of 1663, was asystematic presentation of the philosophy of Descartes, to which he added his own suggestions for its improvement, and it already contained many of the characteristic elements of his later work. The "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" ("Theologico-Political Treatise") of 1670 was an examination of superficial popular religion in general and a vigorous critique of the militant Protestantism practised in Holland at the time. He argued that Christians and Jews could live peaceably together if they would only rise above the petty theological and cultural controversies that divided them. The core of Spinoza's ethical views was encapsulated in his early "Tractatus de intellectus emendatione" ("Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding").
But his major work was the monumental "Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata" ("Ethics"), an abstract and difficult work, finished in 1676 but only published posthumously in 1677. Each of its five consituent books comprises a long sequence of numbered propositions, each of which is deduced through a method consciously modelled on the deductive logic used by the Greek mathematician Euclid in his seminal work on geometry. Like Euclid, Spinoza started with a small set of self-evident definitions and axioms, meticulously built up his deductive argument, and concluded each section with a triumphant "QED"("quod erat demonstrandum", or "that which was to be demonstrated"). It is sometimes held up as a supreme example of a self-contained metaphysical system, whose object is nothing less than to explain everything, the total scheme of reality.
As a young man, Spinoza had subscribed to Descartes' belief in Dualism, that body and mind are two separate substances. However, he later changed his view (as demonstrated in the "Ethics") and asserted that they were not separate, but a single identity, and that body and mind were just two names for the same reality. Starting from Descartes' definition of substance as "that which requires nothing other than itself in order to exist", Spinoza's conclusion was quite different from that of Descartes: where Descartes saw the one underlying substance as being God, Spinoza saw it as the totality of everything (in other words,Nature). All of reality, then, was really just one substance, and all apparently different objects were merely facets or aspects (what he called "modes") of that underlying substance. In this way, Spinoza refined Descartes' rather unsatisfactory treatment of the mind-body problem in Philosophy of Mind by positing that the physical and mental worlds (extension and consciousness) were essentially one and the same thing. This was therefore a kind of Monism, as opposed to Descartes' Dualism, (more specifically, it was a historically significant solution known as Neutral Monism).
Following on from this analysis, then, Spinoza saw God and Nature as just two names for the same reality of the universe, essentially a kind of Pantheism. Thus, he believed that there was just one set of rules governing the whole of reality, and that the basis of the universe was a single substance, of which all lesser entities are actually "modes" or modifications. Spinoza's "God" (or "Nature") was therefore a being of infinitely many attributes, of which extension and thought were but the two that we can understand. He envisaged a God that was not a transcendent creator of the universe who rules over the universe byprovidence, but a God that itself is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. Thus, for Spinoza, God effectively is the infinite natural world and He has no separate "personality", nor is he in some way outside of Nature (supernatural).
Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation ofnecessity, leaving absolutely no room for free will and spontaneity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, andfreedom (or what we presume to be free will) is limited to merely our capacity to know that we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. Nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's world, and reason does not work in terms ofcontingency.
Spinoza's Ethics have much in common with Stoicism in as much as both philosophies sought to fulfill a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness (Eudaimonism). He asserted that the "highest good" was knowledge of God, which was capable of bringing freedom from fear and the tyranny of the passions, and ultimately true blessedness. However, Spinoza differed sharply from the Stoics in his rejection of their contention that reason could overcome emotion. He contended that an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion, and that knowledge of the true causes of passive emotions (those not rationally understood) could transform them into active emotions (ones that can be rationally understood), thus anticipating by over 200 years one of the key ideas of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939).
Spinoza took the Moral Relativist position that nothing is intrinsically good or bad, except to the extent that it is subjectively perceived to be by the individual. In a completely ordered world where "necessity" reigns, the concepts of Good and Evil can have no absolute meaning. Everything that happens comes from the essential nature of objects or of God/Nature, and so, according to Spinoza, reality is perfection, and everything done by humans and other animals is also excellent and divine. If circumstances sometimes appear unfortunate or less than perfect to us, it is only because of our inadequate conception of reality. He asserted that sense perception, though practical and useful for rhetoric, is inadequate for discovering universal truth.

While it is easy to see why both the Jewish and Christian authorities of Spinoza's day felt both appalled and threatened by his ideas, his philosophy did hold an attraction for late 18th Century Europeans in that it provided an alternative to Materialism,Atheism and Deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas in particular strongly appealed to them: the unity of all that exists; the regularityand order of all that happens; and the identity of spirit and nature

By Movement / School > Modern > Rationalism Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(Pastel by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, 1753)

Introduction

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) was a French philosopher and writer of theAge of Enlightenment.
His Political Philosophy, particularly his formulation of social contract theory (orContractarianism), strongly influenced the French Revolution and the development of Liberal, Conservative and Socialist theory. A brilliant, undisciplined and unconventional thinker throughout his colourful life, his views on Philosophy of Education and on religion were equally controversial but nevertheless influential.
He is considered to have invented modern autobiography and his novel "Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse" was one of the best-selling fictional works of the 18th Century (and was important to the development of Romanticism). He also made important contributions to music, both as a theorist and as a composer.

Life

Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712 in Geneva, Switzerland (although he spent most of his life in France, he always described himself as a citizen of Geneva). His mother, Suzanne Bernard, died just nine days after his birth from birth complications. His father, Isaac Rousseau, a failed watchmaker, abandoned him in 1722 (when he was just 10 years old) to avoid imprisonment, after which time Rousseau was cared for by an uncle who sent him to study in the village of Bosey. His only sibling, an older brother, ran away from home when Rousseau was still a child.
His childhood education consisted solely of reading the Plutarch's "Lives" and Calvinist sermons in a public garden. His youthful experiences of corporal punishment at the hands of the pastor's sister developed in later life into a predilection formasochism and exhibitionism. For several years as a youth, he was apprenticed to a notary and then to an engraver.
In 1728, at the age of 16, Rousseau left Geneva for Annecy in south-eastern France, where he met Françoise-Louise de Warens, a French Catholic baroness. She later became his lover, but she also provided him with the education of a nobleman by sending him to a good Catholic school, where Rousseau became familiar with Latin and the dramatic arts, in addition to studying Aristotle. During this time he earned money through secretarial, teaching and musical jobs.
In 1742, he moved to Paris with the intention of becoming a musician and composer. He presented his new system ofnumbered musical notation to the Académie des Sciences but, although ingenious and compatible with typography, the system was rejected.
He was secretary to the French ambassador in Venice for 11 months from 1743 to 1744, although he was forced to flee to Paris to avoid prosecution by the Venetian Senate (he often referred to the republican government of Venice in his later political work). Back in Paris, he befriended and lived with Thérèse Levasseur, a semi-literate seamstress who bore him five childrenall of whom were left at the Paris orphanage soon after birth.
Towards the end of the 1740s, he became friends with the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784) and contributed several articles to the latter's "Encyclopédie". However, the friendship soon became strained and Diderot later described Rousseau as being "deceitful, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and full of malice".
His 1750 "Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts" ("Discourse on the Arts and Sciences") won him first prize in an essay competition (on whether or not the development of the arts and sciences had been morally beneficial, to which Rousseau had answered in the negative) and gained him significant fame. He also continued his interest in music and his popular opera "Le Devin du Village" ("The Village Soothsayer") was performed for King Louis XV in 1752. He was outspoken in his defence ofItalian music against the music of popular French composers such as Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683 - 1764). In 1754, he returned to Geneva where he re-converted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship.
In 1755, Rousseau completed his second major work, the "Discours sur l’origine et les fondments de l’inegalite"("Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men", usually known as the "Discourse on Inequality"), which waswidely read and further solidified Rousseau’s place as a significant intellectual figure. However, it also caused him to gradually become estranged from his former friends such as Diderot and the Baron von Grimm and from benefactors such asMadame d'Epinay, although he continued to enjoy the support and patronage of one of the wealthiest nobles in France, theDuc de Luxembourg. In 1761, Rousseau published the successful romantic novel "Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse" ("Julie, or The New Heloise").
In 1762, he published two major books, "Du Contrat Social, Principes du droit politique" ("The Social Contract, Principles of Political Right") in April and then "Émile, ou de l’Éducation (or "Émile, or On Education") in May. The books criticized religion and were banned in France and Geneva, and Rousseau was forced to flee. He made stops in Bern, Germany and inMôtiers, Switzerland, where he enjoyed for a time the protection of Frederick the Great of Prussia and his local representative,Lord Keith. However, when his house in Môtiers was stoned in 1765, he took refuge in England with the philosopher David Hume, although he soon began to experience paranoid fantasies about plots against him involving Hume and others.
He returned to the southeast of France, incognito and under a false name, in 1767. The following year, he went through alegally invalid marriage to his mistress Thérèse, and in 1770 he was finally allowed to return to Paris. One of the conditionsof his return was that he was not allowed to publish any books, but after completing his "Confessions", Rousseau beganprivate readings in 1771. He was ordered to stop by the police, and the "Confessions" was only partially published in 1782, four years after his death (all his subsequent works were only to appear posthumously).
His latter years were largely spent in deliberate withdrawal, although he continued to write, including the "Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne" ("Considerations on the Government of Poland"), "Rousseau: juge de Jean-Jacques"("Rousseau: Judge of Jean-Jacques") and "Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire" ("Reveries of the Solitary Walker"), supporting himself by copying music.
Rousseau died on 2 July 1778 of a hemorrhage while taking a morning walk on the estate of the Marquis de Giradin atErmenonville, near Paris. Sixteen years later, his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris (across from those of his contemporary, Voltaire).

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Rousseau saw a fundamental divide between society and human nature and believed that man was good when in the state of nature (the state of all other animals, and the condition humankind was in before the creation of civilization), but has beencorrupted by the artificiality of society and the growth of social interdependence. This idea of the natural goodness of humanity has often led to the attribution the idea of the "noble savage" to Rousseau, although he never used the expression himself and it does not adequately render his idea.
He did not, however, imply that humans in the state of nature necessarily acted morally (in fact, terms such as 'justice' or 'wickedness' are simply inapplicable to pre-political society as Rousseau understood it). For Rousseau, society's negative influence on men centers on its transformation of "amour de soi" (a positive self-love which he saw as the instinctive human desire for self-preservation, combined with the human power of reason) into "amour-propre" (a kind of artificial pride which forces man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others).
In "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" (1750) Rousseau argued that the arts and sciences had not been beneficial to humankind because they were not human needs, but rather a result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the opportunities they created for idleness and luxury contributed to the corruption of man, undermined the possibility of true friendship (by replacing it with jealousy, fear and suspicion), and made governments more powerful at the expense of individual liberty.
His subsequent "Discourse on Inequality" (1755) expanded on this theme and tracked the progress and degeneration of mankind from a primitive state of nature to modern society in more detail, starting from the earliest humans (solitary beings, differentiated from animals by their capacity for free will and their perfectibility, and possessed of a basic drive to care for themselves and a natural disposition to compassion or pity). Forced to associate together more closely by the pressure ofpopulation growth, man underwent a psychological transformation and came to value the good opinion of others as an essential component of their own well-being, which led to a golden age of human flourishing (with the development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property and the division of labour) but which also led to inequality.
Rousseau concluded from his analysis of inequality that the first state was invented as a kind of social contract, but a flawed one made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful to trick the general population and institute inequality as a fundamental feature of human society. In "The Social Contract" of 1762 (his most important work and one of the most influential works ofPolitical Philosophy in the Western tradition), he offered his own alternative conception of the social contract. Opening with the dramatic lines, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they", Rousseau claimed (contrary to his earlier work) that the state of nature was a primitive and brutish condition, without law or morality, which humans deliberately left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation.
He argued that, by joining together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and yet remain free, because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others, and also ensures that they themselves obey because they are (collectively) the authors of the law. It should be noted that Rousseau was bitterly opposedto the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly; rather, he held that they should make the laws directly, which would effectively prevent the ideal state from becoming a large society, such as France was at the time.
Rousseau's views on religion were highly controversial. His view that man is good by nature conflicted with the doctrine oforiginal sin, and his theology of nature (as well as the claims he made in "The Social Contract" that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens) led to the condemnation and banning of his books in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris.
Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property, and therefore is considered to some extent a forebear of modern Socialism, Marxism and Anarchism. He also questioned the assumption that the will of the majority is always correct, arguing that the goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality and justice for allwithin the state, regardless of the will of the majority.

Rousseau set out his influential views on Philosophy of Education in his semi-fictitious "Émile" (1762). The aim of education, he argued, is to learn how to live righteously, and this should be accomplished by following a guardian (preferably in the countryside, away from the bad habits of the city) who can guide his pupil through various contrived learning experiences. He minimized the importance of book learning and placed a special emphasis on learning by experience, and he recommended that a child's emotions should be educated before his reason. He took the subordination of women as read, however, and envisaged a very different educational process for women, who were to be educated to be governed rather than to govern

The Eleatic School is an early Pre-Socratic school of philosophy founded by Parmenides in the 5th Century B.C. at Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy. Other important members of the school include Zeno of Elea, Melissus of Samos (born c. 470B.C.) and (arguably) the earlier Xenophanes of Colophon (570 – 480 B.C.)
Xenophanes in particular criticized the belief in a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods which was then current, and Parmenidesdeveloped his ideas further, concluding that the reality of the world is "One Being", an unchanging, timeless, indestructiblewhole, in opposition to the theories of the early physicalist philosophers. Later, he became an early exponent of the duality ofappearance and reality, and his work was highly influential on later Platonic metaphysics.
Zeno of Elea is best known for his paradoxes (see the Paradoxes section of the page on Logic). But Aristotle has also called him the inventor of the dialectic (the exchange of propositions and counter-propositions to arrive at a conclusion), and Bertrand Russell credited him with having laid the foundations of modern Logic.
The Eleatics rejected the epistemological validity of sense experience, preferring reason and logical standards of clarity and necessity to be the criteria of truth. Parmenides and Melissus generally built their arguments up from indubitably sound premises, while Zeno primarily attempted to destroy the arguments of others by showing their premises led to contradictions("reductio ad absurdum").
Although the conclusions of the Eleatics were largely rejected by the later Pre-Socratic and Socratic philosophers, their arguments were taken seriously, and they are generally credited with improving the standards of discourse and argument in their time.

Pythagoreanism is an early Pre-Socratic Greek school of philosophy based around the metaphysical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers. Their views and methods were influential on many later movements including Platonism, Neo-Platonism andCynicism.

The early Pythagoreans (the first society was established in about 530 B.C.) met in the Greek Achaean colony at Croton inSouthern Italy, but after becoming caught up in some fierce local fighting, the movement dispersed and those that survived fled back to the Greek mainland and settled around Thebes and Phlius.

Pythagoras himself wrote nothing down, and we must rely on the second-hand accounts of his followers and commentators,Parmenides, Empedocles, Philolaus (c. 480 - 385 B.C.) and Plato, but accounts are often sketchy and sometimescontradictory.

Pythagorean thought was dominated by mathematics, but it was also profoundly mystical. Pythagoras (along with his teacherPherecydes of Syros), was one of the first philosophers to believe in metempsychosis (the transmigration of the soul and itsreincarnation after death). He also subscribed to the views of another of his teachers, Anaximander, that the ultimate substance of things is what he described as "apeiron" (variously described as "the boundless" or "the undefined infinite").Pythagoras believed that the apeiron had inhaled the void from outside, filling the cosmos with vacuous bubbles that split the universe into many inter-connected parts separated by "void", and that this play of apeiron and peiron takes place according to a natural harmony. Always somehow underlying all these theories is the asumption that numbers and mathematics constitute the true nature of things.

The Pythagoreans were well-known in antiquity for their vegetarianism, which they practised for religious, ethical and asceticreasons. Women, who were held to be different from men, but not necessarily inferior, were given equal opportunity to study as Pythagoreans, although they had to also learn practical domestic skills.

Pythagoreanism developed at some point into two separate schools of thought:

the "akousmatikoi" (or "listeners"), who focused on the more religious and ritualistic aspects of Pythagoras' teachings;
the "mathematikoi" (or "learners"), who extended and developed the more mathematical and scientific work he began.

The akousmatikoi claimed that the mathematikoi were not genuinely Pythagorean, but followers of the "renegade" PythagoreanHippasus (c. 500 B.C.) The mathematikoi, on the other hand, allowed that the akousmatikoi were indeed Pythagorean, but felt thatthey were more representative of Pythagoras' real views. The mathematikoi group eventually became closely associated withPlato and Platonism, and much of Pythagoreanism seems to overlap Platonism. The akousmatikoi became wandering ascetics, finally joining the Cynicism movement of the 4th Century B.C.

Neo-Pythagoreanism was a revival, in the 2nd Century B.C. - 2nd Century A.D. period, of various ideas traditionally associatedwith the followers of Pythagoras. Notable Neo-Pythagoreans include 1st Century Apollonius of Tyana (c. 40 - 120 A.D.), and their meetings were mainly held in Rome.

Ultimately, Pythagoreanism has been a dynamic force on Western culture. It has creatively influenced philosophers,

By Movement / School > Modern > Rationalism Malebranche

Nicolas Malebranche
(Engraving by de Rochefort, 1707)

Introduction

Nicolas Malebranche (1638 - 1715) was a French philosopher of the Age of Reason. He was initially a follower of the Rationalism of René Descartes (orCartesianism), and a vociferous opponent of the British Empiricist school of thought.
However, he was also a devout Christian, and sought to synthesize the thought ofDescartes and St. Augustine in order to demonstrate the active role of God inevery aspect of the world, developing in the process his own doctrine ofOccasionalism.
He always enjoyed high esteem in his home country and, although his reputation outside France diminished during the 18th Century, many have begun to argue in recent years that the originality and unity of his philosophical system merits him a place alongside such Rationalist figures as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz.

Life

Malebranche (pronounced mal-BRONSH) was born on 6 August 1638 in Paris, France, the youngest child of his father Nicolas Malebranche (a secretary to King Louis XIII of France) and his mother Catherine de Lauzon (the sister of a Viceroy of Canada).
He was born with a severely malformed spine and weak lungs, and he therefore received his early education from a private tutor. However, he left home at the age of sixteen to study at the University of Paris, first at the Collège de la Marche where he pursued a course of philosophy, and subsequently at the Collège de Sorbonne where he studied theology. He rejected theScholasticism taught at the university, though, and entered the Paris Oratory in 1660, where he devoted himself toecclesiastical history, linguistics, the Bible, and the works of St. Augustine. He was ordained a priest in 1664.
It was also in 1664, that Malebranche happened upon Descartes' "Traité de l'homme" ("Treatise on Man"), an account of thephysiology of the human body without resorting to Aristotelianism and Scholasticism. He was so impressed with the work, and the possibilities it suggested, that he spent the next decade studying Descartes's system in detail.
At the end of that time, in 1674 and 1675, Malebranche published the two volumes of his first and most extensive philosophical work, "De la recherche de la vérité" ("Concerning the Search after Truth"), which laid the foundations for his philosophicalreputation and ideas. In later editions, he responded to criticisms and substantially expanded on the original arguments.Gottfried Leibniz met Malebranche in Paris in about 1675, and the two corresponded at length thereafter.
Malebranche published his "Traité de la nature at de la grâce" ("Treatise on Nature and Grace") in 1680, and the attacks on it by fellow Cartesian philosopher (and Jansenist), Antoine Arnauld (1612 - 1694), led to a long and bitter dispute, mainly ontheological grounds, but which also branched out into most areas of their respective philosophical systems. Arnauld's supporters persuaded the Roman Catholic Church to place the "Treatise on Nature and Grace" on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1690 (and "Concerning the Search after Truth" was also prohibited later, in 1709).
Malebranche continued to publish books throughout the 1680s, and he died in Paris on 13 October 1715 at the age of 77.

Work

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Like René Descartes, Malebranche held that humans attain knowledge through ideas or immaterial representations in the mind, but whereas Descartes believed that ideas were mental entities, Malebranche argued (more or less following St. Augustine) thatall ideas exist only in God and that we see all things in God ("vision in God"). These ideas, therefore, are uncreated andindependent of finite minds and, when we access them intellectually, we apprehend objective truth.
Malebranche divided truth (which he saw in terms of relations between ideas) into two categories: relations of magnitude("speculative" truths, such as those of geometry) and relations of quality or perfection (the "practical" truths of ethical principles which, for Malebranche, were divine in their foundation, universal in their application, and to be discovered byintellectual contemplation).
His great innovation was to explain how universal divine ideas could also serve as the immediate objects of human minds in the sensual perception of particulars, by suggesting that, whereas the mind's intellectual conception of ideas is pure anddirect, its sensual perception of them will be modified by "sensations" proper to individual created minds. Thus, to a different mind (one with a different sensation), the same idea could represent a different individual of the same general kind.
Malebranche's initial approach to the mind-body problem followed of the Dualism of Descartes, but later, in the "Entretiens sur la métaphysique et la religion ("Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion") of 1688 for example, he argued that we do not have a complete conception of the powers of the mind, and thus no clear conception of the nature of the mind. With regard topsycho-physical interaction, Malebranche argued that body could not act on mind, nor mind on body, and the only active power (and the only efficient cause of change in the world) is God.
This idea developed into Malebranche's main doctrine of Occasionalism, that God is the only causal agent and that all created things merely provide "occasions" for divine activity. For example, God's laws governing what we call the "interaction" of body and mind, are such that similar movements in the body will "occasion" similar ideas in the mind, although in reality both the idea in the mind and the movement in the body are caused by God.
He also held that, in creating the world, God observed what Malebranche called "order" and bound himself to act according to a few simple laws of nature, chosen in accordance with his general will that the world be as good as possible. He used this idea of general will or volition in his theodicy (his reponse to the fact of the the existence of evil in a world created by a good God), arguing that, although God could act by particular volitions to prevent specific natural evils, he could only do so by departing from the simple laws of his general volitions, which are the supreme mark of His wisdom. Thus, for the most part, God acts through "general volitions" only (which may necessitate some specific evils), and it is only in exceptional cases (e.g. miracles) that he would resort to "particular volitions".
Malebranche's ideas greatly influenced the theory of Immaterialism or Pure Idealism of Bishop George Berkeley and, entirely independently of him, Arthur Collier (1680 - 1732), as they took the final step to a full denial of the existence of material substance. Gottfried Leibniz was also inspired by his correspondence with Malebranche to design his theory of pre-established harmony as an alternative to Malebranche's Occasionalism. David Hume drew upon Malebranche's negative arguments to show that no genuine causal connections could be conceived between distinct entities, although Hume then turned inwards to the workings of the human mind for his solutions, rather than upwards to God.

In addition to his major works on Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, theology and Ethics, Malebranche also published studies ofoptics, the laws of motion and the nature of colour, and he particularly pursued such non-philosophical areas late in life. He also wrote on mathematics and, although he made no major mathematical discoveries of his own, he was instrumental inintroducing and disseminating the contributions of Descartes and Leibniz in France.

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