Disagreement, progress, and the goal of philosophy

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Abstract

Modest pessimism about philosophical progress isthe view that while philosophy may sometimes make some progress, philosophy hasmade, and can be expected to make, only very little progress (where the extentof philosophical progress is typically judged against progress in the hardsciences). The paper argues against recent attempts to defend this view on thebasis of the pervasiveness of disagreement within philosophy. The argument fromdisagreement for modest pessimism assumes a teleological conception ofprogress, according to which the attainment of true answers to the bigphilosophical questions, or knowledge of them, is the primary goal ofphilosophy. The paper argues that this assumption involves a misconception ofthe goal of philosophy: if philosophy has a primary goal, its goal is theunderstanding of philosophical problems rather than knowledge of answers to philosophicalquestions. Moreover, it is argued that if the primary goal of philosophy issuch understanding, then widespread disagreement within philosophy does notindicate that philosophy makes little progress.

Original languageEnglish
Article number45
JournalSynthese
Volume201
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Research on this paper was generously funded by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 650/18). Versions of this paper were presented at the 7th TiLPS Descartes Lectures Online Conference at Tilburg University, at the Israel Association of Philosophy annual conference, and at the University of Haifa. For helpful comments, I am grateful to audiences in these fora, to anonymous reviewers of this journal, and to Arnon Levy, Assaf Weskler, David Fire, Gil Sagi, Iddo Landau, Henk de Regt, Philip Kitcher, Ruth Weintraub, Saul Smilansky, and Tamar Parush.

Funding Information:
Research on this paper was generously funded by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 650/18). Versions of this paper were presented at the 7th TiLPS Descartes Lectures Online Conference at Tilburg University, at the Israel Association of Philosophy annual conference, and at the University of Haifa. For helpful comments, I am grateful to audiences in these fora, to anonymous reviewers of this journal, and to Arnon Levy, Assaf Weskler, David Fire, Gil Sagi, Iddo Landau, Henk de Regt, Philip Kitcher, Ruth Weintraub, Saul Smilansky, and Tamar Parush.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Keywords

  • Disagreement
  • Knowledge
  • Philosophicalprogress
  • Understanding

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Philosophy
  • Social Sciences (all)

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