Alan Nelson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a leading scholar of the great philosophical systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has published widely on rationalism in the history of philosophy and in the philosophy of science.

List of Contributors.

Acknowledgments.

List of Abbreviations.

Introduction.

Part I: The Core of Rationalism.

1. The Rationalist Impulse (Alan Nelson).

2. The Rationalist Conception of Substance (Thomas M. Lennon).

3. Rationalist Theories of Sense Perception and Mind-Body Relation (Gary Hatfield).

4. Rationalism and Education (David Cunning).

Part II: The Historical Background.

5. Plato's Rationalistic Method (Hugh H. Benson).

6. Rationalism in Jewish Philosophy (Steven Nadler).

7. Early Modern Critiques of Rationalist Psychology (Antonia LoLordo).

8. Rationalism and Method (Matthew J. Kisner).

9. Cartesian Imaginations: The Method and Passions of Imagining (Dennis L. Sepper).

Part III: The Heyday of Rationalism.

10. Descartes' Rationalist Epistemology (Lex Newman).

11. Rationalism and Representation).

12. The Role of the Imagination in Rationalist Philosophies of Mathematics (Lawrence Nolan).

13. Idealism and Cartesian Motion (Alice Sowaal).

14. Leibniz on Shape and the Cartesian Conception of Body (Timothy Crockett).

15. Leibniz on Modality, Cognition, and Expression (Alan Nelson).

16. Rationalist Moral Philosophy (Andrew Youpa).

17. Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Rationalist Reconceptions of Imagination (Dennis L. Sepper).

18. Kant and the Two Dogmas of Rationalism (Henry E. Allison).

Part IV: Rationalist Themes in Contemporary Philosophy.

19. Rationalism in the Phenomenonological Tradition (David Woodruff Smith).

20. Rationalist Elements of Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Paul Livingston).

21. Proust and the Rationalist Conception of the Self (Alan Nelson).

22. Rationalism in Science (David Stump).

23. Rationality Decision making: Descriptive, Prescriptive, or Explanatory (Jonathan Michael Kaplan).

24. What is a Feminist to do with Rational Choice? (Mariam Thalos).

25. Rationalism in the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Richard N. Manning).

Index