Topics Philosophy

Question Do philosophers ever completely agree and should they?

Accepted:
September 23, 2010

Comments

They completely agree on the point that they never completely agree on anything.

Whether they should agree on this or on anything else is an interesting question. Historians often disagree on what actually happened, and given that there are no facts in philosophy, the scope for disagreement is of course extended. Even when they agree philosophers usually agree for different reasons, which makes the agreement rather tenuous, at best. On the other hand, there is little more tedious than a bunch of philosophers who agree with each other, so perhaps we should rejoice in disagreement.

I disagree with Prof. Leaman that philosophers completely agree on the point that they never completely agree on anything. Uh oh, did I just prove his point?

Anyway, putting aside the problem that if "completely" is taken literally, then almost nothing is completely agreed on (and not just in politics). But philosophers do pretty much agree on a lot, including some of the "rules" for how to disagree (e.g., we pretty much all agree that we should not accept ad hominems, we should use the principle of charity, we should reject invalid arguments--and we pretty much agree about what counts as invalid, etc.).

But even among substantive issues, there's a substantial agreement about some of them. You may want to check out the results of a large-scale survey of philosophers here. Notice that the survey picked topics precisely because they are live issues of debate (so there might be more agreement about other issues that are "dead" because "pretty much" agreement has been reached). Nonetheless, the vast majority of professional philosophers are realists about the external world (not skeptics or idealists), and on several issues, significant majorities favor one position over another: e.g., atheism over theism, scientific realism over anti-realism, cognitivism over non-cognitivism in ethics.

But, yeah, we like to pick out the hard problems and disagree about them. That's part of our job.

Question Do philosophers ever completely agree and should they? Accepted:September 23, 2010

Question Do philosophers ever completely agree and should they?

Accepted:
September 23, 2010