id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-4060		Rationalism - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	10137	1359	58	Different degrees of emphasis on this method or theory lead to a range of rationalist standpoints, from the moderate position "that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge" to the more extreme position that reason is "the unique path to knowledge".[5] Given a pre-modern understanding of reason, rationalism is identical to philosophy, the Socratic life of inquiry, or the zetetic (skeptical) clear interpretation of authority (open to the underlying or essential cause of things as they appear to our sense of certainty). In the 17th-century Dutch Republic, the rise of early modern rationalism – as a highly systematic school of philosophy in its own right for the first time in history – exerted an immense and profound influence on modern Western thought in general,[6][7] with the birth of two influential rationalistic philosophical systems of Descartes[8][9] (who spent most of his adult life and wrote all his major work in the United Provinces of the Netherlands)[10][11] and Spinoza[12][13]–namely Cartesianism[14][15][16] and Spinozism.[17] It was the 17th-century arch-rationalists[18][19][20][21] like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz who have given the "Age of Reason" its name and place in history.[22]	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-4060.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-4060.txt