Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

6 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
with each other than with the respects in which they agreed; so, for example,
Spinoza criticized Descartes, Malebranche criticized Spinoza, and Leibniz
criticized Descartes, Spinoza and Malebranche. Again, those who regard these
philosophers as a group often contrast them with the ‘British empiricists’,
namely Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Yet Locke’s use of the important term ‘idea’
owed something to Descartes, and Malebranche influenced both Berkeley and
Hume. Despite all this, the philosophers who are commonly called the
seventeenth-century rationalists did have a number of basic views in common.
All agreed that it is possible to get to know the nature of reality simply by means
of a priori reasoning; that is, that we can get to know by means of the reason,
without any appeal to the senses, truths about reality that are necessary truths. It
is these points of resemblance, above all, that the term ‘rationalist’ picks out. In
this sense, rationalism is not peculiar to the seventeenth century; the ‘dialectic’
that is described in Plato’s Republic (510–11, 532–4) is a rationalist theory. Nor
did rationalism come to an end after the death of Leibniz. It continued to exist,
not just in the writings of Leibniz’s follower Christian Wolff, but also in the form
of the ‘objective idealism’ of Hegel, and perhaps even after that. 27 Our concern,
however, is with its seventeenth-century manifestations.
The time-span of the movement is well enough indicated by the name given to
it. Its first public manifestation was in Descartes’s Discourse on Method,
published in 1637; it ended in 1716, the year in which Leibniz—still
philosophically active—died. Though not as widespread as the Renaissance, it
was by no means confined to one country. Descartes worked in France and the
Netherlands; Malebranche worked in France; Geulincx and Spinoza worked in
the Low Countries, and Leibniz worked mainly in Germany (though one should
not overlook a very productive period which he spent in Paris between 1672 and
1676). Seventeenth-century rationalism also spanned the religions. Descartes and
Malebranche were Roman Catholics (Malebranche, indeed, was a priest);
Geulincx was initially a Catholic but became a convert to Protestantism after
being persecuted for Cartesian views; Spinoza was an excommunicated Jew,
with friends among some of the smaller Protestant sects.
Like Bacon, the rationalists saw themselves as making a new start. Most of
them were contemptuous of Aristotle and the scholastics; 28 indeed, they rejected
everything that passed for received wisdom in their time, as long as it did not
meet the demands of rational scrutiny. This is very clearly expressed in
Descartes’s resolve, stated in the first part of his Meditations, 29 ‘to demolish
everything completely and start again right from the foundations’. But no one
philosophizes in an intellectual vacuum, and it is important to note that the rise
of rationalism in the seventeenth century occurred at the same time as, and was
closely associated with, the rise of what one now calls ‘modern science’. The
new science is discussed at length in Chapter 3 of this volume; here it must be
sufficient to say that the old and largely Aristotelian science stressed the
qualitative aspect of nature, and was primarily concerned to classify, whereas the
new science stressed the quantitative aspect of things, offering explanations that