Rationalism

This concise survey, clearly accessible to students and general readers alike, traces the main elements from the classical period down to the present day. The reader will find a lucid account of the arguments of the great seventeenth-century rationalists, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, on scientific knowledge, mind and body, and freedom and necessity, and will see these compared with the empiricist counter-arguments of Locke and Hume, and the great synthesis of Immanuel Kant. Later sections carry the story forward to the ideas of Hegel, and more recent developments in Russell, Wittgenstein and Ayer, Quine and Kripke, Chomsky and Popper, together with rationalists and anti-rationalists elements in modern ethics. The book as a whole serves as a compact and highly readable introduction to many of the most central and enduring questions of philosophy.