Realistic Rationalism
Jerrold J. Katz
The MIT Press
In Realistic Rationalism, Jerrold J. Katz develops a new philosophical                  position integrating realism and rationalism. Realism here means that the objects of                  study in mathematics and other formal sciences are abstract; rationalism means that                  our knowledge of them is not empirical. Katz uses this position to meet the                  principal challenges to realism. In exposing the flaws in criticisms of the                  antirealists, he shows that realists can explain knowledge of abstract objects                  without supposing we have causal contact with them, that numbers are determinate                  objects, and that the standard counterexamples to the abstract/concrete distinction                  have no force. Generalizing the account of knowledge used to meet the challenges to                  realism, he develops a rationalist and non-naturalist account of philosophical                  knowledge and argues that it is preferable to contemporary naturalist and empiricist                  accounts. The book illuminates a wide range of philosophical issues, including the                  nature of necessity, the distinction between the formal and natural sciences,                  empiricist holism, the structure of ontology, and philosophical skepticism.                  Philosophers will use this fresh treatment of realism and rationalism as a starting                  point for new directions in their own research.