> Do I understand your comment correctly in that thoughts should be either rational or not?
You didn't understand correctly. "Rationalist", in the OP, is a historical label which can retrospectively be applied to a specific set of thinkers, who defended specific beliefs, from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
None of them were claiming they were the only people who thought "rationally"; rather, they were mostly claiming that only rational thought could reach truth, and empirical evidence need not factor into it.
In modern parlance, the Rationalists believed that all knowledge would end up being deductive, like math.
> Gödels theorems are hardly ever relevant to most of mathematics and not in the least to computers (which are finite).
> I also doubt that industrialism has anything to do with Leibnitz or Hume. That part of history is most likely fuelled by greed for money, not for philosophical thought.
In this time period, the intellectual circles that Leibniz and Hume frequented are exactly the circles that gave rise to modern economics, the ability to measure longitude at sea, the ability to calculate rates of change over time, using steam to power machines, etc. In other words, we're literally talking about all of the intellectual developments that directly led to the industrial revolution.
> None of them were claiming they were the only people who thought "rationally"; rather, they were mostly claiming that only rational thought could reach truth, and empirical evidence need not factor into it.
This is not my understanding. Rather, the disagreement relates to the primacy and necessity of rational thought in some places. Check out https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/ and you can find two examples of possible interpretations of each position. To be a rationalist does not mean to say that empirical evidence need not factor into knowledge, but just that some is unobtainable via experience, or that gained via rational thought is superior.
There's no doubt multiple views people have held that fall under each umbrella, but I just wanted to highlight that I think the rationalist does allow for some sources of knowledge that are obtainable only via experience. And I can't see how they could deny that experience is required for some knowledge.
(I may have gotten some subtleties wrong, it's a long time since I looked into this)
Thank you for explaining the difference between rationalism and empiricism.
My comment was probably not very clear -- I wished to verify the opinion of the author who wrote the previous comment, not philosophy as a whole. The specific statement that I doubted was "this search gave us ..., the industrial revolution, the computer age, and beyond."
My point about these philosophical thoughts in relation to industry and computers is that it is all quite academic. The halting problem is very interesting to some computer scientists, but it is, IMHO, not at all relevant to produce working solutions in any industry.
However, I do stand corrected with respect to your last paragraph! Leibniz did indeed offer many practical tools, for instance through his differential calculus.
I still wonder about the impact of Hume and Plato on computers. I'd still dare say that these developments could have taken place without academic philosophical thought. That does not take away from the search being amazing and very interesting indeed.
You didn't understand correctly. "Rationalist", in the OP, is a historical label which can retrospectively be applied to a specific set of thinkers, who defended specific beliefs, from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
None of them were claiming they were the only people who thought "rationally"; rather, they were mostly claiming that only rational thought could reach truth, and empirical evidence need not factor into it.
In modern parlance, the Rationalists believed that all knowledge would end up being deductive, like math.
> Gödels theorems are hardly ever relevant to most of mathematics and not in the least to computers (which are finite).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
> I also doubt that industrialism has anything to do with Leibnitz or Hume. That part of history is most likely fuelled by greed for money, not for philosophical thought.
In this time period, the intellectual circles that Leibniz and Hume frequented are exactly the circles that gave rise to modern economics, the ability to measure longitude at sea, the ability to calculate rates of change over time, using steam to power machines, etc. In other words, we're literally talking about all of the intellectual developments that directly led to the industrial revolution.