ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Plato is an example of a rationalist. He says that sense experience fails to provide us with any guarantee that what we experience is, in fact, true. The information we get by relying on sense experience is constantly changing and often unreliable.

Detailed explanation-2: -The first philosophers who are today referred to as having been rationalists include Descartes (1596-1650), Leibniz (1646-1716), and Spinoza (1632-1677). These thinkers thought they were defending a form of rational thought in the form of a science against the older school of thought known as scholasticism.

Detailed explanation-3: -Ancient Greek Rationalism: The first rationalist in Western Philosophy was the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Plato was monumentally important in the history of philosophy.

Detailed explanation-4: -Plato, and to a lesser extent Aristotle, were both rationalists. But Aristotle’s successors in the ancient Greek schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism advanced an explicitly empiricist account of the formation of human concepts.

Detailed explanation-5: -Answer and Explanation: The father of rationalism is Plato. Plato articulates the earliest forms of rationalism in Western thought with his Socratic Dialogues, and this is most succinctly stated in his Allegory of the Cave in the seventh book of The Republic.