Rationalism
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Rationalism is a branch of philosophy where the validity of an idea is determined by logic, rather than religious revelations, meditation, emotions or observations.
Rationalist philosophers believe that all knowledge can be understood through a process of reasoning, without any external sources. They do not believe that human beings can understand everything this way, but that it is theoretically possible. Rationalist philosophers attempt to understand ideas like God and the Soul in this manner.
Rationalism has been particularly popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, with philosophers like René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant.