It always fascinates me that often these "heads in the clouds" type stuff has an enormous impact on history, politics, and other disciplines while what is supposed to be more practical often is ignored or belittled. The most plausible reason is that we have firmer convictions in the little things rather than the large things. This seems to reveal the contemporary, and speaking in philosophical lingo, "modern" tendency to place epistemology as prior to metaphysics. The exception to this thought is the field of ethics. Logic too has been explored in depths through computer science, but this is still -- historically speaking -- in its infancy. The difference between formal logic and computer science is also a gap that cannot be underestimated.