One of the prime concerns of philosophy is epistemology. Trace the developments of rationalism from its beginnings in ancient Greece through the Enlightenment. Can rationalism serve as the organizing principle of a coherent world view today? Explain your reasoning.

I would suggest that you read Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakshott or virtually anything by/about the works of Issiah Berlin. John Gray (Gray’s Anantomy, 2009) provides brief and clearly written analyses of these two thinkers. Although Oakshott’s essay is a classic and doesn’t take long to read.

A brief answer along these lines is that rationalism is a thread in western thought that has lead to extremism, mass murder and great human misery in the name of utopia. The Soviet Union being the central and most recent example, but by no means the only one.

A brief answer along these lines is that rationalism is a thread in western thought that has lead to extremism, mass murder and great human misery in the name of utopia. The Soviet Union being the central and most recent example, but by no means the only one.

One insight of Berlin was that we must evaluate an ideology, not by its writings or its profits but by its fruits, the states that arise based on it. In Marxism we find the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

Even the liberal, rational, principles of the Enlightenment from Kant, Lock and Montequieu spawned neo-conservatism in the USA. This is Gray’s argument, not Berlin’s: a country which systematically practices torture and detention without trial to protect its values from terrorists who don’t share them.