Looking at the listed philosophers is not the best way to understand what’s going on here. The category of rationalists is not “philosophers like those guys,” it is one of a pair of opposed categories (the other being the empiricists) into which various philosophers fit to varying degrees. It is less appropriate for the ancients than for Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz (those three are really the paradigm rationalists). And the wikipedia article is taking a controversial position in putting Kant in the rationalist category. Kant was aware of the categories (indeed, is a major source of the tradition of grouping philosophers into those two categories), and did not consider himself to belong to either of them (his preferred terms for the categories were “dogmatists” for the rationalists and “skeptics” for the empiricists, which is probably enough on its own to give you a sense for how he viewed the two groups). There is admittedly a popular line of Kant interpretation which reads him as a kind of crypto-rationalist, but there are also those of us who read him as a crypto-empiricist, and not a few who take him at his word as being outside both categories.
In any event, the empiricist tradition has at least as much, if not more, influence on the LW wrong crowd as the rationalist tradition, and really both categories work best for early moderns and aren’t fantastic for categorizing most in the present era. So anybody familiar with the philosophical term is likely to find the application to this community initially confusing.
Cool quote, but in this case probably not accurate. From wikipedia:
The term became useful in order to describe differences perceived between two of its founders Francis Bacon, described as an “empiricist”, and René Descartes, who is described as a “rationalist”.
Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I should call it that of radical empiricism, in spite of the fact that such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. I say ‘empiricism’ because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say ‘radical,’ because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, unlike so much of the half way empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy. [William James, preface to “The Sentiment of Rationality” in “The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy,” 1897]
EDIT: There is some debate as to when “modern” use of the term empiricism started, the first use was at least much much older. Stanford.edu writes:
The first people to describe themselves as empiricists (empeirikoi) were a group of medical writers of the Hellenistic period. We know of these thinkers only indirectly, through the work of other ancient writers, in particular Galen of Pergamon (129–ca. 200 CE).
Looking at the listed philosophers is not the best way to understand what’s going on here. The category of rationalists is not “philosophers like those guys,” it is one of a pair of opposed categories (the other being the empiricists) into which various philosophers fit to varying degrees. It is less appropriate for the ancients than for Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz (those three are really the paradigm rationalists). And the wikipedia article is taking a controversial position in putting Kant in the rationalist category. Kant was aware of the categories (indeed, is a major source of the tradition of grouping philosophers into those two categories), and did not consider himself to belong to either of them (his preferred terms for the categories were “dogmatists” for the rationalists and “skeptics” for the empiricists, which is probably enough on its own to give you a sense for how he viewed the two groups). There is admittedly a popular line of Kant interpretation which reads him as a kind of crypto-rationalist, but there are also those of us who read him as a crypto-empiricist, and not a few who take him at his word as being outside both categories.
In any event, the empiricist tradition has at least as much, if not more, influence on the LW wrong crowd as the rationalist tradition, and really both categories work best for early moderns and aren’t fantastic for categorizing most in the present era. So anybody familiar with the philosophical term is likely to find the application to this community initially confusing.
Great comment. I would just like to add that Kant killed/unified Empiricism and Rationalism and after Kant the terms quickly started the fizzle out.
Seems like Kant killed it by naming it.
.
The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao;
because the later philosophers will call themselves “post-Taoists”.
Cool quote, but in this case probably not accurate. From wikipedia:
From etymonline:
EDIT: There is some debate as to when “modern” use of the term empiricism started, the first use was at least much much older. Stanford.edu writes:
EDIT 2: [emphasis added]