This volume draws a balanced picture of the Rationalists by bringing their intellectual contexts, sources and full range of interests into sharper focus, without neglecting their core commitment to the epistemological doctrine that earned them their traditional label. The collection of original essays addresses topics ranging from theodicy and early modern music theory to Spinoza's anti-humanism, often critically revising important aspects of the received picture of the Rationalists. Another important contribution of the volume is that it brings out aspects of Rationalist philosophers and their legacies that are not ordinarily associated with them, such as the project of a Cartesian ethics. Finally, a strong emphasis is placed on the connection of the Rationalists' philosophy to their interests in empirical science, to their engagement in the political life of their era, and to the religious background of many of their philosophical commitments.

Introduction; Carlos Fraenkel, Dario Perinetti, Justin Smith.- Part I Continuities between the Premodern and the Modern.- 1. Descartes on the Human Nature and the Human Good; Lisa Shapiro.- 2. Spinoza on Philosophy and Religion: The Averroistic Sources; Carlos Fraenkel.- 3. Music, Mechanics and 'Mixed Mathematics'; Alison Laywine.- Part II Creating Traditions.- 4. Ethics in Descartes and Seventeenth Century Cartesian Textbooks; Roger Ariew.- 5. Louis Bourguet and the Model of Organic Bodies; François Duchesneau.- Part III Rethinking Spinoza.- 6. "Nemo non videt": Intuitive Knowledge and the Question of Spinoza's Elitism; Hasana Sharp.- 7. Rationalism versus Subjective Experience: The Problem of the Two Minds in Spinoza; Syliane Malinowski-Charles.- Part IV Legacies of Rationalism.- 8. Spinoza's Anti-Humanism: An Outline; Yitzhak Y. Melamed.- 9. Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Gods of Philosophy; Steven Nadler.- 10.Leibniz on Infinite Beings and Non-Beings; Ohad Nachtomy.- 11.Grounding the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Leibnizian Rationalism and the Humean Challenge; Brandon C. Look.- Name Index.- Subject Index.

Carlos Fraenkel is an associate professor in the departments of philosophy and Jewish studies at McGill University in Montreal. His publications include From Maimonides to Samuel ibn Tibbon: The Transformation of the Dalâlat al-Hâ'irîn into the Moreh ha-Nevukhim, Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2007 (Hebrew) and Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza-Reason, Religion, and Autonomy, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Dario Perinetti is associate professor in the department of philosophy at Université du Québec à Montréal. He has published on David Hume, G.W. Hegel and early modern philosophy of history. He is currently completing a manuscript book on David Hume. Justin E. H. Smith is associate professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of Divine Machines: Leibniz's Philosophy of Biology (Princeton University Press, 2010), and is currently working on a critical edition and translation for the Yale Leibniz series, with François Duchesneau, of Georg Ernst Stahl's Negotium Otiosum. His current research concerns the impact of European colonial expansion and exploration in the 16th and 17th centuries on early modern philosophical reflections about human nature and human difference.