Topics Philosophy

Question Critics of philosophy say that it is a subject that hasn’t made any real progress. Why waste time constructing elaborate theories that are not scientifically provable? Why waste so much time pondering questions where the resulting ideas do not really change the world in any significant manner?

Accepted:
July 19, 2012

Comments

It's not clear to me that philosophy doesn't progress, despite its critics' claims to the contrary. Yet the progress that philosophy makes IS, admittedly, different from that made by, for example, the natural sciences. Whereas natural sciences--normally--answer questions, philosophical progress does not consist in the resolution of questions (which is, of course, the basis for complaints about the discipline itself), but in sharpening or even transforming questions, or proposing answers to questions that may not yet have been thought of (or even of renovating OLD answers to questions). While philosophy does not, admittedly-at least usually--add to our stock of knowledge (Moritz Schlick once said that writing down propositions proved in philosophy is a pastime highly to be recommended, knowing full well that the list might well be empty)--they do, however, illuminate our concepts and can yield new ways of thinking about older problems that may put them in a new light. This, to me, does count as progress. (Albeit of a very different sort from that made by the natural sciences.)