5 April 2012, Spinoza lectures, Michael Friedman

Abstract:
The Second Lecture applies the historical approach I have been developing to issues of interest within contemporary philosophy involving naturalism, mathematics, and the place of normativity in a scientific world-view. I do this by briefly sketching a new look at the history of philosophical rationalism and its involvement with mathematical science from Plato, through the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century (Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz), to Kant. And I aim thereby to indicate how we might fruitfully go on from this rationalist tradition today.

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