Academic & Crossref DOI Search

Abstract: What is the epistemic significance of reflecting on a discipline’s past for making progress in that discipline? The author assumes that the answer to this question negatively correlates with that discipline’s degree of progress over time. If and only if a science is progressive, then what people have thought and argued in the past in that discipline ceases to be up to date. This chapter distinguishes different dimensions of disciplinary progress and subsequently argue that veritic progress, that is, collective convergence to truth, is the most important dimension for disciplines with scientific ambitions. It then argues that, on the one hand, veritic progress in philosophy is more significant than many current philosophers believe, but that, on the other hand, it also has severe limitations. The author offers an explanation of these limitations that suggests that the history of philosophy should play some role, though only a minor one, in systematic philosophy.

Abstract: In an inaugural lecture delivered at St Andrews in 1891, Sir Henry Jones raised questions about the possibility of progress in philosophy explicitly re-opening doubts to which Hume had given memorable expression 150 years before. This chapter charts the remarkable extent to which, beginning with Thomas Brown, each generation of Scottish philosophers in the 19th century was initially hailed as one of brilliant originality, only to be decried as profoundly mistaken in the next. Given this history, the chapter seeks to articulate a conception of philosophical inquiry in which progressive development possible. It rejects any conception of progress modelled on the natural sciences, and turns instead to music and the arts.

Abstract: Abstract This paper offers an explanation for why some parts of philosophy have made no progress. Philosophy has made no progress because it cannot make progress. And it cannot because of the nature of the phenomena philosophy is tasked with explaining—all of it involves consciousness. Here, it will not be argued directly that consciousness is intractable. Rather, it will be shown that a specific version of the problem of consciousness is unsolvable. This version is the Problem of the Subjective and Objective. Then it is argued that the unsolvability of this latter problem is why there are other unsolvable philosophy problems.