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Leibnitz followed very closely in the footsteps of the Neoplatonists and he was what you'd call a rationalist's rationalist. He would be later rebuked by Hume (

by dvt 3y ago

Leibnitz followed very closely in the footsteps of the Neoplatonists and he was what you'd call a rationalist's rationalist. He would be later rebuked by Hume (the famous is-ought problem made moral—ought—problems fundamentally distinct from rational—is—problems) and Kant would put the nail in the coffin of the rationalist-empiricist debate in the next century (with his earth-shattering Critique of Pure Reason). And if that wasn't enough, as the logical positivists of the early 20th century were still clinging to some form of mathematical completeness, Gödel proved that the project dreamed up by Leibnitz (and more distantly by Plato) was a dead end, to Wittgenstein’s, Russell’s and many others' dismay. Some things (even true ones!) are simply unprovable. I love this story as it spans more than 2000 years, and even though the idea itself proved to be untenable, this search gave us the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the computer age, and beyond.

smokel 3y ago
Hmm. Do I understand your comment correctly in that thoughts should be either rational or not? I think different kinds of thinking have their applications in different contexts. 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 Leibniz or Hume. That part of history is most likely fuelled by greed for money, not for philosophical thought.
- routerl 3y ago
  > 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). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - Winsaucerer 3y ago
    > 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/ 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)
  - smokel 3y ago
    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.
routerl 3y ago
> the project dreamed up by Leibnitz (and more distantly by Plato) More distant than that. It all comes from Euclid. Who, you know, was actually tremendously successful in that project.
- dvt 3y ago
  > More distant than that. It all comes from Euclid. Who, you know, was actually tremendously successful in that project. I of course know of his Elements, but is there any evidence that Euclid was an axiomatic reductionist? Was he trying to turn everything into an axiomatic system? I regrettably don't know enough about him and should probably rectify that (any book suggestions?).
  - routerl 3y ago
    I don't have any real suggestions, but the two important Euclidean books were the Elements and the Data; the latter is about what exists, and the former is about the relations between what exists. You're right that Plato was the first to write that there are non-mathematical relationships, and to try to formalize them, but what he meant by "non-mathematical" basically meant "non-geometric"; recall that we're talking about a few hundred years before the invention of algebra. This laid the seed for Aristotle to formally declare that logic is its own discipline, rather than just the method used in geometry, and this is when we see these projects extend to everything, but no longer as axiomatic pursuits.
thomasjv 3y ago
Kurt Gödel was a rationalist. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/#GodRat https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/#GodRat
coldtea 3y ago
>and Kant would put the nail in the coffin of the rationalist-empiricist debate in the next century (with his earth-shattering Critique of Pure Reason) Kant was mostly convincing for himself (to whom he was a great fan of) and Kantians. His arguments were hardly definitive. >Some things (even true ones!) are simply unprovable Within the context of a system with certain algebraic properties.
- routerl 3y ago
  > Kant was mostly convincing for himself (to whom he was a great fan of) and Kantians This is shown to be false by the historical record. Kant was, unquestionably, the most influential thinker of his day. Centuries later, Einstein himself felt that it was necessary to write about how Kant was wrong (given modern physics and general relativity), which shows how convincing and influential Kant's arguments were; there's no point to debunking things no one believes. You're probably looking at Kant with contemporary eyes, thereby deciding that he's obviously wrong and completely unconvincing. But no one looked at Kant with contemporary eyes until contemporary times, and there's a very long road of extremely important and influential scientists/mathematicians/philosophers replying to Kant; which is how our contemporary perspective came to exist. >> Some things (even true ones!) are simply unprovable > Within the context of a system with certain algebraic properties. Right, that's what "provable" means. There's no such thing as a proof, outside of formal inferential systems.
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  - coldtea 3y ago
    >You're probably looking at Kant with contemporary eyes, thereby deciding that he's obviously wrong and completely unconvincing Rather with late 19-th and 20th century eyes, those continental philosophy (as opposed to analytic philosophy). >There's no such thing as a proof, outside of formal inferential systems Well, only if we constrain it to formal axiomatc proofs. But there are exhaustive proofs (which don't need axiomatic steps), as there are proofs by example, and even proving by non-axiomatic argumentation and fuzzy evidence (as in a court). Leibniz's/Russel's/Hilbert's axiomatic mathematical proofs are not the only game in town, nor do they exhaust human reasoning.
Reflecticon 3y ago
I love your coherence. Can you recommend a book (if you have read it) that explains in detail what you have summarized?
- dvt 3y ago
  If you want all the details, I can recommend a philosophy degree :P

by dvt 3y ago

smokel 3y ago

Hmm. Do I understand your comment correctly in that thoughts should be either rational or not? I think different kinds of thinking have their applications in different contexts. 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 Leibniz or Hume. That part of history is most likely fuelled by greed for money, not for philosophical thought.

routerl 3y ago
> 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). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Winsaucerer 3y ago
  > 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/ 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)
- smokel 3y ago
  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.

routerl 3y ago

> the project dreamed up by Leibnitz (and more distantly by Plato) More distant than that. It all comes from Euclid. Who, you know, was actually tremendously successful in that project.

dvt 3y ago
> More distant than that. It all comes from Euclid. Who, you know, was actually tremendously successful in that project. I of course know of his Elements, but is there any evidence that Euclid was an axiomatic reductionist? Was he trying to turn everything into an axiomatic system? I regrettably don't know enough about him and should probably rectify that (any book suggestions?).
- routerl 3y ago
  I don't have any real suggestions, but the two important Euclidean books were the Elements and the Data; the latter is about what exists, and the former is about the relations between what exists. You're right that Plato was the first to write that there are non-mathematical relationships, and to try to formalize them, but what he meant by "non-mathematical" basically meant "non-geometric"; recall that we're talking about a few hundred years before the invention of algebra. This laid the seed for Aristotle to formally declare that logic is its own discipline, rather than just the method used in geometry, and this is when we see these projects extend to everything, but no longer as axiomatic pursuits.

thomasjv 3y ago

Kurt Gödel was a rationalist. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/#GodRat https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/#GodRat

coldtea 3y ago

>and Kant would put the nail in the coffin of the rationalist-empiricist debate in the next century (with his earth-shattering Critique of Pure Reason) Kant was mostly convincing for himself (to whom he was a great fan of) and Kantians. His arguments were hardly definitive. >Some things (even true ones!) are simply unprovable Within the context of a system with certain algebraic properties.

routerl 3y ago
> Kant was mostly convincing for himself (to whom he was a great fan of) and Kantians This is shown to be false by the historical record. Kant was, unquestionably, the most influential thinker of his day. Centuries later, Einstein himself felt that it was necessary to write about how Kant was wrong (given modern physics and general relativity), which shows how convincing and influential Kant's arguments were; there's no point to debunking things no one believes. You're probably looking at Kant with contemporary eyes, thereby deciding that he's obviously wrong and completely unconvincing. But no one looked at Kant with contemporary eyes until contemporary times, and there's a very long road of extremely important and influential scientists/mathematicians/philosophers replying to Kant; which is how our contemporary perspective came to exist. >> Some things (even true ones!) are simply unprovable > Within the context of a system with certain algebraic properties. Right, that's what "provable" means. There's no such thing as a proof, outside of formal inferential systems.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 3y ago
  >You're probably looking at Kant with contemporary eyes, thereby deciding that he's obviously wrong and completely unconvincing Rather with late 19-th and 20th century eyes, those continental philosophy (as opposed to analytic philosophy). >There's no such thing as a proof, outside of formal inferential systems Well, only if we constrain it to formal axiomatc proofs. But there are exhaustive proofs (which don't need axiomatic steps), as there are proofs by example, and even proving by non-axiomatic argumentation and fuzzy evidence (as in a court). Leibniz's/Russel's/Hilbert's axiomatic mathematical proofs are not the only game in town, nor do they exhaust human reasoning.

Reflecticon 3y ago

I love your coherence. Can you recommend a book (if you have read it) that explains in detail what you have summarized?

dvt 3y ago
If you want all the details, I can recommend a philosophy degree :P