Method, Substance, and Monads: A Narrative Review of Rationalism's Literature --- Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Rationalism is philosophy's great experiment in method: reason's instruments --- doubt, demonstration, and the principle of sufficient reason --- applied until the world's architecture emerged. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that experiment. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the Cartesian method, in which the Discourse, the Meditations, and the Cambridge philosophical writings fixed the foundation --- the cogito, the clear and distinct, and the mind-body problem's birth; the system's expansion, in which Spinoza's Ethics in Curley's translation, Malebranche's Search After Truth, and Leibniz's Monadology and New Essays rebuilt the edifice --- substance monism, occasionalism, and the monads' harmony; and the critique and the syntheses, in which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason answered the method, and the modern scholarship of Cottingham, Nadler, Garber, and the Frankfurt essays restored the rationalists' arguments to the canon. It is concluded that the literature describes a single methodological wager --- that reason's instruments can reach the world's structure unaided by sense --- whose Cartesian statement, Spinozist geometry, and Leibnizian calculus are one method's three lives, and whose Kantian critique is the wager's great adjudication.
Authors: Revista, Zen, PHILOSOPHY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204777699