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A HISTORY OF “RATIONALISM” IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2015

JOSHUA BENNETT
JOSHUA BENNETT*
Affiliation:
St John's College, Oxford E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , April 2018 , pp. 63 - 91
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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5 I.e. “rationalist,” “rationalistic,” and “rationalizing.”

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