Does philosophy make progress? If so, how?
The word "philosophy" derives from Greek words meaning "love of wisdom", in a sense of "love" that in Greek meant attracted to or drawn toward it. I take it then that characteristic activity of philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, not the possession or exercise thereof. Wisdom, in turn, is not merely some set of correct opinions, but rather the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad; or at least the more true from the less true, the better from the worse; the ability, in short, to discern superior answers from inferior answers to any given question.
As regards philosophical progress, the preceding definition of philosophy gives us an immediate answer to the question of what progress in philosophy would look like, because this definition tells us what philosophy is trying to do, and progress is then just success at doing that. Because philosophy, thus construed, is not directly trying to answer questions about what is real or what is moral, philosophical progress is not made by correctly speculating on the nature of some specific thing's being or purpose. Rather, philosophical progress is made by devising useful methods of answering questions about those things, and consequently the related issues of the meaning of such questions, and the importance of those questions. The importance of the question, its pragmatic import, what you need to know the answer for, narrows in on which of the possible meanings of the question matters to you in that context, and with that understanding comes the start of the means of answering it.
In that respect, I think enormous philosophical progress has been made across history with respect to questions about reality, as the physical sciences have settled on a critical, empirical, and realist approach colloquially called "the scientific method", rejecting appeals to authority and the supernatural. Progress with respect to questions about morality has been slower, but still apparent, with concerns for liberty and hedonic flourishing becoming gradually more widespread, in contrast to obedience to authority and intangible moral purity; though there is still quite far to go in that respect.
As regards philosophical progress, the preceding definition of philosophy gives us an immediate answer to the question of what progress in philosophy would look like, because this definition tells us what philosophy is trying to do, and progress is then just success at doing that. Because philosophy, thus construed, is not directly trying to answer questions about what is real or what is moral, philosophical progress is not made by correctly speculating on the nature of some specific thing's being or purpose. Rather, philosophical progress is made by devising useful methods of answering questions about those things, and consequently the related issues of the meaning of such questions, and the importance of those questions. The importance of the question, its pragmatic import, what you need to know the answer for, narrows in on which of the possible meanings of the question matters to you in that context, and with that understanding comes the start of the means of answering it.
In that respect, I think enormous philosophical progress has been made across history with respect to questions about reality, as the physical sciences have settled on a critical, empirical, and realist approach colloquially called "the scientific method", rejecting appeals to authority and the supernatural. Progress with respect to questions about morality has been slower, but still apparent, with concerns for liberty and hedonic flourishing becoming gradually more widespread, in contrast to obedience to authority and intangible moral purity; though there is still quite far to go in that respect.
Comments (71)
Quoting 180 Proof
I.e. 'progress' by pragmatic negations - making room for agency (pace Kant) - rather than by incrementally more general, or abstract, totalizing systems (or "theories of everything").
Yes! Philosophy, at its best, rids you of the traps thought can keep you in, so you can move on safely to what matters. Its a painstaking self-inoculation. Totalizing systems are like guys who steroid themselves against past humiliations into near-immobility.
Regression, an antonym of progression, isn't a term that can be easily applied to life.
More on topic, is that not exactly what constitutes progress, at least for most fields? Explaining more and more with less and less?
In this context the issue is maybe a totalizing personal type, with which I associate an earnestness and a love of careful classification. The anti-type here is the ironic aphorist. In both cases there are totalizing theories, but the difference is how tightly versus ambivalently they are held.
As far as progress goes, I think philosophy takes a baseball bat to the usual comforting fantasies in pursuit of an unusual comforting fantasy, which is a vision of the world through our dead God's eyes.
I find that there's a connection between the loss of these fantasies and 'learning how to die.' So I'm an ambivalent aphorist, who's not quite sure that the wise are wise in their wisdom.
Ash on an old man's sleeve...is all the ash the burnt roses leave. But what else has he got, our old man, whilst this machine remains stubbornly to him? He doesn't have to be physically old. It's philosophy that paints you gray.
let's flip that. Why is totalizing good even if you have no audience? (also, importantly, synthesizing isn't the same as totalizing.)
That is certainly true. Higher levels of generalizations in mathematics has led to understanding how seemingly diverse concepts are alike. But this knowledge may not shed light on many existing puzzles in specific areas beneath these umbrellas. Generalizations avoid the nitty-gritty. Sometimes abstraction is merely abstraction.
I like that. For me the traps might be personalities, where the danger is becoming fixed and predictable and essentially (?) a bad poet. Philosophy is strange in wanting to transcend personality while tending to demonstrate it. 'This is the way that I like to transcend the ego. This is what I understand as scientific. ' Philosophy is something like a 'big picture' relationship with the world. The deep stuff (along with politics and art) is a secular replacement for religion. The totalizer brings the good news, the squared circle. The aphorist has a tone like:
[quote=Pound]
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case . . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor" . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
[/quote]
https://poets.org/poem/hugh-selwyn-mauberly-excerpt
Yup, and so much of life depends on the skilled handling of the nitty-gritty. Skill is not a set of handy general propositions, though handling such general propositions is its own skill. Philosophy is the skill of playing with difficult and totalizing ideas.
You can't kill or triumph over a discarded self by proximity to a marquee truth. I mean, heck guy, what do you think the import of 'path' is?
I was hoping to squeeze more out of you on the totalizer versus the alternative. As I read him, the non-totalizer or aphorist is just as in love with grand narratives. I would like there to be a nice fluffy god out there, something that sews the mess together. What's available (ignoring simple animal immersion is joyful little things that might do the heavy lifting) is a transcendence that's hard to divorce from the morbid.
'In anguish there are only distances.' The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace. The ground opening was a flap. Is there progress, if there is such a thing, in philosophy, if there is such a thing? He splits up a peach of grass.
I'm not exactly clear on what you mean. I do see that anti-totalizers like myself are mostly ringing variations on Nietzsche. I haven't had the sense of a discarded self for quite a while now. That's what I'm calling being old. In my 20s I went through lots of changes. In the 30s I was already just sharpening an equilibrium state.
I like path as a metaphor for the singularity of a journey. I want some transcendent god's eye view, but I know...from within some approximation of that view...that we are all stained by our histories. What I liked about the first post I responded to in this thread was the theme of vulnerability. It's painful to realize that we can't be our own parents, literally and metaphorically. We are enabled as individuals in the first place by a system we did not choose. That's what's fascinating about Dreydegger or Hegel or the sociology I'm reading lately. We can manage only a minor deviation here and there. We are late to a party that has seen everything, including its having seen everything. And another critique of a certain kind of start-from-zero totalizing is that it needs to forget its thrownness, that is has parents, that it is constrained in ways that it does not recognized, caged in the vocabulary it takes for granted. But what's outside the cage? Perhaps merely an enlargement of that vocabulary. 'I'm set free to find a new illusion.'
I'm unclear what you take the aim of philosophy to be, that your account of its progress is as you've said. And if you see attempts to do different things as unrecognizable as philosophy.
I, for instance, as outlined in the OP, see philosophy as something like meta-science: the aim of philosophy is to account of how best to go about answering our various questions, investigating things like what our questions even mean, what criteria we use to judge the merits of a proposed answer, what methods we use to apply those criteria, what faculties we need to enact those methods, who is to exercise those faculties, and why any of it matters at all.
There's no kind of comforting narrative or anything about God in any of that (though I address the topics of comforting narratives about God and such under the banner of that last question about why anything matters, mostly to reject them). The only thing "totalizing" about any of it is just a big picture of what abstract principles have what implications on all of those different kinds of meta-questions.
Do you (or others like you here) see that kind of project as not philosophical? Or not totalizing in the sense you mean?
Maybe I'm just crazy, but I think myth haunts everything. I was usually in bands with male friends, and we were all lit up by a fantasy of what the band could be, and each thought the others were great musicians, truly cool, etc. It was great.
I'm suggesting that everyone is lit up by myths. That the place beyond myth is itself a seductive myth. I don't think that there are real or core selves, though of course there is more and less spontaneous interaction. If you are gesturing at that pure state of play that lovers and friends can achieve, and this is the place beyond myth, then I do understand you and agree. I just read those states of play as still swimming in the myth, only playfully, less fastened to some image of the self.
Yeah that's the move. And it ballasts itself with the idea of pure states of play and so forth. The problem is its wrong, and I may be wrong, but I have a hunch, based on your shuttling between personas, that you're probably in a vicious repeating circle. Well, one part of the circle at least seems bristling with the idea of a pure state of play, which is a temporary salve - but then, and so on and so on
One of the things I like to think I've learned from philosophy is a suspicion of definitions. The word 'philosophy' is alive and well as a token in our form of life. The life of this token (and of tokens like 'truth') exceeds any careful articulation. I'm not saying that such articulations are worthless. I simply can't approach them without some sense of the futility of the game. I don't write the English language. The English language writes me.
That said, I associate the most important philosophy with a basic stance taken on existence and a basic vision of existence. In that sense philosophy is like a map for maps. So I largely agree with this:
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm surprised you don't see the connection of the above with some kind of comforting narrative. If you think there are neutral answers to those questions above, then that to me is a highly comforting narrative. 'Reason is one and universal.' That's all we have left of the Pentecost.
Quoting Pfhorrest
How entangled is all of this with the stance that the individual philosopher takes on existence ? To read Nietzsche or Schopenhauer is feel your way into their world and their role in it as they see it. As philosophy becomes safer and more dry, perhaps it also becomes the dry legitimization of an ordinary sanity that doesn't really need it.
Like I said, maybe I'm crazy, but I really do think that we are profoundly mythological animals and that our interactions occur within a shared gallery of types. We all play off on each other against an inherited background of types. TV imitates life imitates TV. It doesn't mean we don't love one another, but it does raise the question of what exactly it is we love. A beloved person is another vortex in the shared cultural stream, another critic of the movie of the world, perhaps a co-hero, and philosophy is perhaps the critic as hero.
:vomit:
I do think that that is the direction that philosophy needs to head, getting back on the topic of progress.
There some old aphorism I heard once in my first philosophy class along the lines of "Before walking the path to enlightenment, tables are tables and tea is tea. Along the path to enlightenment, tables are not tables and tea is not tea. Upon reaching enlightenment, tables are again tables, and tea is again tea." (If anyone can help me find the original source of that, I'd appreciate it).
I see progress in philosophy as consisting of, basically, tallying up all the broad kinds of confusion that people could find themselves getting trapped in, elucidating why those approaches are wrong, and then once people are securely shielded from that kind of insanity, letting them just go about life in a way much like they would have if they had never been tempted into that kind of confusion. Or as I write in the intro to my philosophy book, in which I try to make such progress:
The 'pure whatever' thing is great, but isn't that the structure of life? People fall in and out of love, be it sexual or Platonic/creative.
What about its Greek origins and the role of love in, for example, Plato?
I've always like that quote, but note that it also deflates enlightenment. Illusions are our special friends.
Quoting Pfhorrest
The place where we meet is the stuff I've posted in Bedrock Beliefs. Call it 'logical pragmatism' or whatever you like, but something like that seems right to me. The 'insanity' that Wittgenstein and others ward off, however, is only the relatively innocent game of bad philosophy.
I don't see a clean answer to the question of whether it's better to live a safe and respectable life of many years or a risky, intense life that ends quickly. Is it better to write philosophy or put that time into learning the piano or making a fortune? I don't know. Is it a good thing to be born? I don't know. Sometimes I pity the dead. Sometimes I envy them. Sometimes I wish I hustled after money more in my youth, if only to buy some more space from others now. I think, rightly or wrong, that this kind of reflection is common.
And surely others feel that they are caught up in the current of a world that is bigger than them. The 'species essence' expresses itself only the plurality of personalities. I can't contain that essence (general human potential) all on my own. I can't manifest conflicting possibilities. Life is short. We are shaped by a particular childhood, etc. I can make extending myself a project, but even then belief in God is not a live option for me, and that would be a decisive inaccessible difference. Is it better to believe in God? I don't know. I just know I can't and work within that cage. I guess the point is that we don't start from zero, and that the goal of perfect rationality seems to require that we do, that everything pass the test of some atemporal reason.
I don't think we can escape our animality. Philosophy is more like the forging of tools or the composition of jokes or the continuation of religion by other means. Maybe all at the same time.
Do you perchance know where it is from / the exact quote?
Maybe I first saw it in Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching. Or maybe in a Krishnamurti interview. But I don't know the original source.
Here's a quote that adds to this thread, I think:
[quote=Rorty]
Philosophers are saddled with expectations which no one could possibly meet. They are supposed to respond helpfully to large questions posed by anguished laymen. (Am I more than a swarm of particles? What meaning does life have?) They are supposed to be paragons of argumentative rigour, strenuously criticising seemingly obvious premises, fearlessly pushing inferences to bitter ends. Finally, they are supposed to be learned and wise. They are expected to have read all that has been written in response to the layman’s large questions, and to rearrange it in novel and luminous dialectical patterns, sympathetically harmonising all the suggestions offered by all the great dead philosophers.
Since philosophy became self-consciously professional, the first task has usually been disdained as ‘mere’ edification. The analytic philosophers take on the second assignment, and congratulate themselves on their ‘scientific’ devotion to truth, hardness of nose, and sheer cleverness. The so-called ‘speculative’ and ‘Continental’ philosophers – those impressed by the examples of Hegel or Whitehead or Heidegger – take on the third. They weave webs of words which put their predecessors in their proper dialectico-historical places. The analysts despise the fuzziness of the speculators. The Continentals despise the illiteracy and gimmickry of the analysts. Both despise the cheerful, wealthy, unprofessional authors of best-selling paperbacks on how to live. A good time is had by all.
[/quote]
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n09/richard-rorty/persuasive-philosophy
The review is worth reading in its entirety. Those best selling paperbacks are what I'd call 'deep' philosophy, even if we find this or that personality obnoxious. To practice one of the other kinds is to have already decided with respect to the 'existential' stuff.
[quote= Rorty]
To this we can imagine the existentially intense layman replying: ‘I thought you were promising an explanation of how knowledge is possible – how I, a poor little animal on an insignificant planet, a mere swirl of quarks, can nevertheless grasp the nature of the universe, the depths of heaven and earth. I thought you might at least tell me what methods I should use to be sure of getting knowledge. What happened? All I got was a way of defining “knowledge” which splits the difference between me and some crazy sceptic.’ ... What to say to somebody who suggests you are a brain in a vat is a nice testing-ground for dialectical acuity, a paradigm of the sort of thing about which one can be precise and argumentative, but it is just not the kind of issue which ever ‘moved anybody to take up the study of philosophy’. It is the sort of issue you get into after you’ve shrugged off the existential, after you’ve dismissed the question of how you might be precious and valuable as jejune, and have settled for competitive, coercive technicalities. (This is the loss of Eden which makes hard-nosed professional philosophers out of eager adolescents.)
[/quote]
I think 'loss of Eden' is a great phrase there. Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is one of my favorite texts, and he makes better arguments against the traditional 'referee' conception of philosophy than I am liable to manage. I also recommend Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
[quote=Rorty]
…one consequence of antirepresentationalism is the recognition that no description of how things are from a God's-eye point of view, no skyhook provided by some contemporary or yet-to-be-developed science, is going to free us from the contingency of having been acculturated as we were. Our acculturation is what makes certain options live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, or trivial, or optional.
[/quote]
This is why I think we can't have some perfect timeless rationality that can lift itself up by its own bootstraps. We are blinded by our eyes. The condition for the possibility of conversation is the condition of the impossibility of a conversation that presupposes nothing. The philosopher 'irrationally' decides what is worth addressing in the first place. Critical language as it is spoken is employed uncritically, with the 'assumption' that it intelligibly signifies and has value for others. Metaphors like 'falling' or 'immersion' point to what I mean.
A certain kind of philosophy wants to deny that we are along for the ride, tied to something that drags us along. We want to be autonomous, self-determined. There's an image of noble stasis at the center, I think. If the stoic has to die, he at least doesn't want to die like a lil' bitch. 'It's no use whimpering.' Transcendence is a fragile equilibrium that includes the sense of mastery of a situation. So 'existential philosophy' is a kind of half-rational poetry that functions quasi-religiously this way. Something like that.
"As a field" it's a scholarly profession piggybacking Meta- that discourses on (i.e. critiques) other "fields" - scientific, technological or humanistic. Measured by its ever-voluminous annual output of publications, academic philosophy certainly "progresses" ... All useful stuff; however, almost all trivial - e.g. anglophone analytic-positivist scholasticism or fashionably francophone sophistry.
Sophistry maybe "leads" some (e.g. Rorty, Derrida, Ayn Rand, William Lane Craig, et al) ... but philosophy spurs goads dares each of us to think for oneself, and provides discursive exercises (i.e. aporias, dialectics, gedankenexperiments, etc) with which to practice reflectively.
Quoting Pfhorrest
De-fine precisely the totality of real numbers.
De-fine precisely the totality of the real.
De-fine precisely the totality of time.
[ ... ]
The conceit of "totalizing" is that the map = territory, which is useless nonsense. Maps are useful precisely because they are abstractions excluding every detail of the territory except those for which they are designed to track or depict. Most domains of knowledge are approximative - non-totalizable, or maps; thus, it's scientistic to assume a 'total science' (or final ToE) is achievable; and (too) many philosophers since Aristotle (or earlier) have been guilty of - IMO deluded by - this sort of science-envy (i.e. meta-scientism). NB: Btw, I'll remind you I'm, at heart, a spinozist nonetheless. :smirk:
Philosophy concerns concepts and discursivity [reflecting] whereas nonformal sciences, broadly speaking, concern phenomena [explaining]. I don't understand why or how so many still conflate philosophy with science (Witty).
No doubt. "Most fields", but not all - e.g. music, dance, history, mathematics, chess, etc, ... which, like philosophy, do not explain how 'things' are (transform), only at most describe (depict) or instruct (usage of) 'them'.
And the sciences spun off from natural philosophers investigating the kinds of things science investigates, and convincing each other as a discursive community (and enough of the rest of the world) that doing things the scientific way was the way to that kind of investigation.
No it isn't. Philosophy has never succeeded in 'grounding' the sciences, and the sciences don't take seriously any attempts it's made to. Scientific method (to the extent there is such a thing) develops from cultural and economic pressures on the one hand, and methodological disputes internal to the sciences on the other.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No they didn't. The important physicists and chemists weren't important philosophers, and vice versa. The closest that ever came to happening was Descartes, maybe. Even if this were true, it would just be a historical quirk about the relation of two disciplines – still. philosophy would have made no progress with respect to what its methods and goals have always been (goal: figuring out broad truths, method: talking).
This makes sense to me. Then, even on a personal level, a non-expert (maybe a professional musician) can take a general stance toward science, such as whether it is trustworthy and in what way. Then on a personal level both scientists and philosophers can (optionally) wring their hands over their status. Does science give us truth in some grand sense or just reliable technology? Does science touch the real in a way that philosophy or even poetry does not? What the fuck is the real ? What are we even talking about?
I think these embarrassing and 'useless' questions even have an indirect practical utility, though I don't like justifying them that way. To do so concedes too much. What do we mean by practical utility? If we quantify it, we still have to choose and frame those quantities.
Then there's philosophy as an important part politics, which involves all kinds of contentious terms, all kinds of trying to solve things by just talking (including appeals to science.)
I enjoy your anti-philosophical posts, but to push the game along:
If you were to justify your origin story for science, would you do so by appealing to science?
Are these methodological disputes not philosophical simply because scientists are doing them? When do such disputes, if ever, become philosophy of science? Should we exclude the possibility of philosophy's influence on these methodological disputes?
Probably not. You'd probably have to have a decent historian to answer the question in any interesting way. A philosopher would definitely NOT give you a good answer.
I suspect you are, like many, thinking of the supposed scientific method as something much narrower than what I’m talking about in the OP. I just said a critical, empirical, realist approach. That’s something in common to all science, and what distinguishes it from non-science.
Try “doing science” without at least tacitly admitting that your claims are tentative and open to further question, which is what I mean by “critical”. Try “doing science” without at least tacitly admitting that there is some actual objective reality we’re investigating together, which is what I mean by “realist”. Try “doing science” without appeals to observation or regard for concordance with observation, which is obviously what “empirical” means.
Any real scientist will tell you you’re “doing science” wrong, not actually doing science at all; and if they give you the time of day further, may tell you some reasons why that is an inferior way to do things than the proper scientific way. At that point, they are doing philosophy, even though they’re not a professional philosopher.
Quoting Snakes Alive
The most influential pre-modern physicist was Aristotle, whose status as also a philosopher I hope I don’t need to explain. The most influential physicist of the scientific revolution was Isaac Newton, who titled his seminal work as being about “natural philosophy”, and whose philosophical views about the nature of space and time were taught in my philosophy degree. Much more recent physicists like Mach and Einstein were taught in that same class, not their empirical findings, but their philosophical arguments. At the fringes, even today science and philosophy still bleed together.
In any case, you seem to be categorizing people by whether they are scientists or philosophers by reputation, not addressing whether particular things they did were science or philosophy.
Quoting Snakes Alive
This is the real core of our disagreement. You define philosophy in a way that it is trying to do something impossible, and then decry that of course it fails at that. Look at the definition of philosophy the OP begins with: it’s about trying to figure out HOW to “figure out broad truths“, not necessarily figuring them out itself.
“By doing science” is a possible answer to at least part of that question, and that has proven a very successful answer to that part of the question, to the point that philosophers arguing against it today are on the back foot, as a philosophy that denies the soundness of science is seen as prima facie suspicious. Most of the people actually doing science don’t engage in the remaining arguments about its foundations because to their satisfaction the matter has already been settled.
That is a sign that progress has been made, a satisfactory answer had been found, and all that’s left are minor quibbles. When sufficient progress had been made on a construction project, the amount of construction going on there drops precipitously, besides a little ongoing maintenance.
If you think this is not an accurate definition of philosophy in the OP, maybe take it up over at the What is philosophy? thread that this thread spun off from.
No you're not. Philosophy is in no way responsible for any of these vague epistemic virtues. It has had both proponents and opponents of them, and continues to do so, and their adoption (to the extent they are adopted) is never done on philosophical grounds. At best, philosophy tries (and fails) to retroactively justify those virtues by 'grounding' them.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Newton was not a philosopher. You're just punning on the term "natural philosophy," which is what people used to call things like physics. Newton is not (nor Einstein, get real) seriously taught in philosophy curricula, nor can philosophy students or professors (unless they study physics on the side for professional reasons) understand his works with their training. You were taught his 'philosophical ideas about space and time,' by which is meant, you've done what philosophers do, talk about his work in superficial terms out of context after the fact. Philosophers' education does not equip them to understand any of these scientists.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Alright. It hasn't done that either, though.
Quoting Pfhorrest
To the extent that 'an answer was found,' philosophers didn't do it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't care. You're just going to keep moving the goalposts. The problem is, on no reasonable moving of the goalpost will philosophy have made any progress anyway. So move them wherever you want.
6 month old babies employ these methods to establish predictable, useful models of their world. Is your claim that they're 'doing philosophy'? If so, I think most of it's been done by 6 or 7.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Exactly. I think there's a generalised failure among amateur (and some professional) philosophers to understand just how specific scientific theories are. They do not generalise to broad truths. Insofar as they are truths at all, they are truths about specific experimental set ups which inform predictive models of similar environmental setups. Broad truths neither inform them (in any practical sense), nor emerge from them (in any objective sense).
This is my analogy for whether philosophy progresses anything or not;
If I decide to go on a hike; I start at point A one day and walk for several hours, I see a lot of things from a lot of different places. Sometimes i see the same thing from a difference vantage point, perhaps the opposite side of the valley. Maybe I prefer the look of that tree from above on the cliffs or maybe i like it more up close or from the riverside. Perhaps I forget about what I saw because I am focused on newer things or other scenery. Maybe I stop looking altogether and simply focus on getting back to my starting point.
In the end, even if all walks lead back to starting point A, have I learned anything? Have I made progress? Is my sense of my location better now that I understand its relationship to everywhere else? Is that even useful? Do I feel more at ease now that I have explored other places that I could have stayed or ended the hike? Satisfied a curiosity? Or maybe became more rounded on my navigating ability, more stamina. Or was it not worth it at all?
Progress is determined by the destination you've defined. Philosophy spends a lot of it's time defining in the first place. Focusing on how to ask a question rather than what is the answer. It may not be useful to some people or incredibly insightful to another. It may provide an answer for you or just another question.
Ethics is probably the most practical side to philosophy so in that respect yes philopshy progresses many other disciplines such as law, medicine , scientific method and psychology. And the well trained arguments will certainly be used in future to tackle difficult questions about genetic modification AI etc. Because doing without thinking is dangerous. You must look before you leap, that is how you have a safe hike!
If I was to claim anything about them it would be that they’re “doing science”, but since they’re not knowingly using those methods, I wouldn’t even say that really. The “doing philosophy” part comes when those kinds of methods are questioned — even if the answer to that questioning is yes, keep doing that, don’t do something else instead.
I don’t want to respond to Snakes with his obvious hostility or your agreement with him at the end of your post, but I will say that in that philosophy class we were reading primary sources by the figures in question where they were talking about the philosophical implications of their own scientific theories. We weren’t just reading commentary by someone else who extrapolated philosophy from their scientific publications. These scientists knew that their work had implications on outstanding philosophical questions and directly commented on it themselves.
On the one hand, it insists it has made progress. On the other, it asks, 'Well, what is progress, anyway? We can't even know!'
Well? Which is it?
Is it like the old usenet trolls who would go into comp.sys.foo.advocacy and argue that Foo is the worst OS ever and everybody who uses it is stupid?
That sounds like personality in general to me. That's us, foolish mortals talking shit. That's what philosophy struggles against being. 'I am the history from which I'm trying to awake.'
I'd enjoy seeing you argue against yourself, seriously critique yourself. I find your posts fascinating, and I'd genuinely enjoy seeing what you'd come up with.
:fire:
'Woah, woah! When I asked the question, I didn't mean I wanted an answer!'
I get what you're saying, but I think there's an important difference. In philosophy people are actually trying to use the authority their method provides to have some impact on society (be it ethics, religion, scientific methodology, political direction). It's not like advocating an OS where it doesn't matter at all to anyone not using it that it doesn't work. It more like (to continue your analogy) finding out that the world's missile control systems are run on Microsoft Windows. Then it would matter to users and non-users alike whether it works or not.
I agree that no one should really get involved in a discussion about the nature of, say, set theory if they don't actually agree with the whole premise. But if people are advocating a process whose outcomes supposedly include ethical board decisions, research methodology statements, political strategies etc., then I think it's fair game to get involved with that discussion at any level, even if it's to reject the whole premise.
I'm inclined to agree. There's a certain degree of defensiveness around philosophy which seeks to shut off certain avenues of meta-analysis using exactly this kind of rhetorical trick. One has to understand philosophy to reject it, and the very act of rejection proves one does not understand it because anyone who did wouldn't reject it that way. QED.
The other is "Ah! But you're doing philosophy by constructing an argument to reject it" Like all thought is somehow philosophy.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't think arguments have been shut down without consideration have they. Perhaps review the line of argument?
I suggested that the reason he and I disagree about whether philosophy makes progress is that we disagree about what philosophy even is and what it’s trying to do. He defines philosophy in a way that it’s clearly impossible to do what he thinks it’s trying to do; I define it differently (right in the OP) and see progress at that goal as not only possible but evident. Then he replied:
“I don't care. You're just going to keep moving the goalposts. The problem is, on no reasonable moving of the goalpost will philosophy have made any progress anyway. So move them wherever you want.“
Seems pretty straightforwardly shutting down to me.
I agree that the thing he thinks philosophy is trying to do (answer big questions about the world just by talking about them) is not possible and so of course no progress can be made at that. I just disagree that that is an accurate characterization of what philosophy, either historical or contemporary, is trying to do. Historical philosophy (back when that included natural philosophy) didn’t constrain itself to just talking, and contemporary philosophy isn’t usually trying to directly answer questions about the world (but rather about how to answer such questions).
Second, even if you define it as only about second-order questions about how methodologically to answer first-order ones, then even to the extent philosophers have done this, they also have made no progress in this domain.
The first is an empirical question then, for historians, yes? It's an interesting one, but not outside of philology. Did people, in general, use "philosophy" to describe their empirical investigations? That seems like a very specific question answerable only by reference to surviving texts of the period.
The second question I take it you'd like to answer with...
Quoting Pfhorrest
...and the progress you think is made in this respect is the broad outline of what you're calling the 'scientific method'.
So firstly, but perhaps most trivially, it's hard to fit about 99% of modern philosophy into the category of texts answering the question 'how should we best answer questions about the world'. Treatise on ethics, political theory, semantics, concepts, reference... These don't seem to me in any way directing themselves to the question of how to answer the 'big questions'. They seem concerned primarily with definitions, or framing some idea (which often boils down to definitions anyway). You might need to spell out, perhaps with examples, how you see these works as addressing the question as you phrased it.
But secondly, the point of my mentioning the six month old is that it can hardly be considered progress to simply establish that we should carry on doing as we had done since we were toddlers. Do we have a whole discipline dedicated to checking if we should still eat by placing food in our mouths?
I realise it might seem, superficially, as if there's some choice of method to be made, but it's not philosophy which determines that choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics
The sheer fact that there exist so many interpretations, is an embarrassment to philosophy, and most probably to physics, ie both. But philosophers just sing their tune, as usual, unperturbed. It's a shame really, not so for philosophy, since we are used to philosophy being shameless, but for physics, to degenerate to a kind of theology, where there are lots of interpretations, like there are lots of religions, heresies and cults.
I mean seriously, where is the progress here, are we kidding ourselves? Is philosophy just a way to make ourselves seem smart and wise and *deep*, where we are most definitely not?