Is There Progress in Philosophy?

There are at least two affirmative answers to this question. (There are actually more than two affirmative answers, but brevity is the soul of blog.)

1. Yes, there is progress in philosophy; it is just that when philosophy makes progress it is no longer called philosophy. Time was, when all rational inquiry was called philosophy. Aristotle, for example, investigated a wide variety of subjects: formal and informal logic, rhetoric, poetics, physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Given that undeniable progress has been made in some of these fields, philosophy has made progress. No one will deny, for example, that physics and biology have made progress. Given that branches of philosophy have made progress, philosophy has made progress in these branches. It is worth noting that physicists as late as the 19th century were still called natural philosophers. And you will recall that the full title of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia (1686) is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

There is, therefore, a clear sense in which philosophy has made progress. It has made progress in that certain of its branches have made progress.

2. Nowadays, of course, we don't mean by 'philosophy' rational inquiry as such, but a set of questions and problems that are left over after the special sciences, formal or empirical, hard or soft, have staked out their territories and developed methods appropriate to them. We could call this the residual concept of philosophy. This is philosophy in the narrow sense of the term, and it is what people have in mind when they question whether philosophy has made progress.

In philosophy residually or narrowly construed belong all the normative questions that the formal sciences and the sciences of empirical fact do not and cannot address. For example, political science — if we agree to call it 'science' --leaves untouched the sorts of normative questions that are raised in political philosophy. The fundamental problem of political philosophy concerns the source, if there is one, of the state's moral authority. This is clearly a legitimate question but not one that could be answered by a discipline that confined itself to an empirical study of existing states, their constitutions, etc. It is therefore a philosophical question in the narrow sense. And the same goes for the questions of ethics. Normative ethics and metaethics belong to philosophy in the residual or narrow sense because they treat of matters that fall outside the purview of anthropologists and sociologists. Aesthetics too is a normative inquiry and so belongs within philosophy narrowly construed. On some conceptions of logic, it also is a normative discipline and so would belong in philosophy.

Besides normative questions, there are questions of ontology or general metaphysics. Every special science seeks to know the properties of the objects in its domain, but without thematizing the nature of properties as such. The question of what properties are, however, is a legitimate question, along with a host of related questions: what is it for an individual to have a property? Are there different modes of property-possession? Is identity of properties sufficient for numerical identiy? And so on. These ontological questions belong in philosophy narrowly construed. Causation provides another example. Scientists ask what causes what, and they find out. But one can also ask the philosophical question as to what causation is. Knowing that X causes Y can be very useful. But unless I know what it is for one event to cause another, I do not fully understand what it means for X to cause Y.

There are also the questions of special metaphysics about God, the soul, and the world as a whole. These too belong in philosophy narrowly construed.

There is then quite a lot that is left over after the positive sciences have divided up reality for their epistemic conquest. What is left over is left over for philosophy, narrowly construed. But has any progress been made in philosophy so construed?

Progress has been made in that the problems are better understood than ever before. We have made progress in the understanding and formulation of the problems even though we have not solved even one of them in a definitive fashion acceptable to all able practitioners. Indeed the core problems may in the end be intractable. But that is not to say that they are not genuine. They give every indication of being genuine pace Wittgenstein and his epigoni. I would add that knowledge of these problems is valuable in that is give us insight into the limits of our knowledge. Armed with this insight, we will be able to debunk epistemic pretense. Wisdom, as we learned from Socrates, consists in part in the knowledge of our ignorance.

I have given a twofold answer to the title question. Philosophy broadly construed as the pursuit of knowledge has made progress in that the sciences which were originally parts of philosophy have made progress. And philosophy narrowly construed has made progress in expositing and clarifying a large number of questions and problems that are left over after the special sciences have done their work.

Is there not then something wrongheaded about ridiculing philosophy for not making progress? In two clear senses it has made progress, and in the sense in which it has not, that merely reflects the difficulty of the residual questions and the limitations of the human intellect.

Comments

[diotimajsh]

Those are good points, but I think that an anti-philosophy individual could respond in two corresponding ways.

First, while philosophy may have been a precursor to the sciences (and it may still be now), those philosophical pre-scientific speculations contributed nothing of value to the actual scientific knowledge that developed later. Worse, philosophy may even have impeded scientific progress by encouraging researchers to cling to outdated paradigms on philosophical grounds. (This is the approach the scientist Steven Weinberg outlines in a chapter titled "Against Philosophy" in his book, Dreams of a Final Theory). Thus, philosophy has no business claiming the successes of science as its own, even broadly construed, since philosophy does not actually provide any rigorous or useful foundation for further scientific work. Rather, philosophers' speculations are pointless and unverifiable until a real science comes along, at which point the old philosophical argument-based inquires are simply ignored and shuffled away.

Second, of the narrowly construed conception, an anti-philosopher might ask, What good are we doing clarifying these esoteric problems anyway? You suggest we will be able to "debunk epistemic pretense". Sounds good, but does that ever happen in practice? It does not appear to me that philosophical criticisms of epistemic overreach (for example, of particularly extravagant religious claims) have more real power than non-philosophical criticisms. (Note that there is probably a sense in which any meaningful criticism is 'philosophical', but here I mean philosophical specifically as related to the academic discipline and formal training therein).

[BV]

You are not getting my point. The point is not that the speculations of the Ionian nature philosophers or later Greek thinkers of the classical period had the value of solid scientific results, but that in ancient Greece there arose a way of thinking that attempted a rational explanation of nature, a way of thinking that broke radically with mythical ways of thinking. That new way of thinking was philosophy in the broad sense that encompasses all rational inquiry.

Your second question doesn't merit a response.

Sorry to be so abrupt, but comments weren't supposed to be turned on on this post in any case. I no longer accept comments except in rare cases.