Rationalist in the context of "Foundationalism"

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a work by John Locke concerning the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. It first appeared in 1689 (although dated 1690) with the printed title An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate (tabula rasa, although he did not use those actual words) filled later through experience. The essay was one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley.

Book I of the Essay is Locke's attempt to refute the rationalist notion of innate ideas. Book II sets out Locke's theory of ideas, including his distinction between passively acquired simple ideas—such as "red", "sweet", "round"—and actively built complex ideas, such as numbers, causes and effects, abstract ideas, ideas of substances, identity, and diversity. Locke also distinguishes between the truly existing primary qualities of bodies, like shape, motion and the arrangement of minute particles, and the secondary qualities that are "powers to produce various sensations in us" such as "red" and "sweet." These secondary qualities, Locke claims, are dependent on the primary qualities. He also offers a theory of personal identity, offering a largely psychological criterion. Book III is concerned with language, and Book IV with knowledge, including intuition, mathematics, moral philosophy, natural philosophy ("science"), faith, and opinion.

Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre (1 April 1753 – 26 February 1821) was a Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, and political philosopher. He is chiefly remembered as one of the intellectual forefathers of modern conservatism, noted for his advocacy of social hierarchy and monarchy in the period immediately following the French Revolution. French by language and culture, Maistre was nonetheless a subject of the King of Piedmont–Sardinia, whom he served in various government positions, including stints in the Savoy Senate (1787–1792), as ambassador to the Russian Empire (1803–1817), and as minister of state to the court in Turin (1817–1821).

A key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment and a precursor of Romanticism, Maistre regarded monarchy both as a divinely sanctioned institution and as the only stable form of government. Maistre argued that the rationalist rejection of Christianity was directly responsible for the Reign of Terror and the chaos that followed the Revolution of 1789 in France. He therefore called for the restoration of the House of Bourbon to the throne of France and for the ultimate authority of the Pope in both spiritual and temporal matters.

Traditionalist conservatism, often known as classical conservatism, is a political and social philosophy that emphasizes the importance of transcendent moral principles, manifested through certain posited natural laws to which it is claimed society should adhere. It is one of many different forms of conservatism. Traditionalist conservatism, as known today, is rooted in Edmund Burke's political philosophy, as well as the similar views of Joseph de Maistre, who designated the rationalist rejection of Christianity during previous decades as being directly responsible for the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution. Traditionalists value social ties and the preservation of ancestral institutions above what they perceive as excessive rationalism and individualism. One of the first uses of the phrase "conservatism" began around 1818 with a monarchist newspaper named "Le Conservateur", written by Francois Rene de Chateaubriand with the help of Louis de Bonald.

The concepts of nation, culture, custom, convention, religious roots, and tradition are heavily emphasized in traditionalist conservatism. Theoretical reason is regarded as of secondary importance to practical reason. The state is also viewed as a social endeavor with spiritual and organic characteristics. Traditionalists think that any positive change arises based within the community's traditions rather than as a consequence of seeking a complete and deliberate break with the past. Leadership, authority, and hierarchy are seen as natural to humans. Traditionalism, in the forms of Jacobitism, the Counter-Enlightenment and early Romanticism, arose in Europe during the 18th century as a backlash against the Enlightenment, as well as the English and French Revolutions. More recent forms have included early German Romanticism, Carlism, and the Gaelic revival. Traditionalist conservatism began to establish itself as an intellectual and political force in the mid-20th century.

Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England's leisured travellers to examine "the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty". Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of Gothic and Celticism, was a part of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century.

The term "picturesque" needs to be understood in relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: the beautiful and the sublime. By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment and rationalist ideas about aesthetics were being challenged by accounts of the experiences of beauty and sublimity that involved non-rational elements. Aesthetic experience was not just a simply deliberate, conscious rational decision based on principles of, e.g., symmetry, proportion, and harmony. It could come, for instance, more naturally as a matter of instinctual response involving the non-rational appetites. For instance, Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful argued that the soft gentle curves appealed to the male sexual desire, while the sublime horrors appealed to our desires for self-preservation.