ABSTRACT
The mainstay of seventeenth-century continental philosophy was rationalism. Two of the three philosophers most frequently classified as rationalists, Rene Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, have made a large impact on the enquiry through their work in mathematics. The third, Spinoza, so revered mathematical method that he modelled his major work his philosophical masterpiece Ethics on Euclid's axiomatization of geometry. Along with the other rationalists, Leibniz held that true infinity could be grasped by the intellect but not by the imagination. The truly infinite was the absolute, God, who in his absoluteness was not formed by the addition of parts but preceded all composition. The three philosophers most frequently classified as empiricists are J. Locke, G. Berkeley, and D. Hume, who were respectively English, Irish, and Scottish. To a large extent their philosophy was a reaction to rationalism.
