Disagreement, progress, and the goal of philosophy

Arnon Keren

doi:10.1007/s11229-022-04030-0

Disagreement, progress, and the goal of philosophy

Arnon Keren

Department of Philosophy

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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 language	English
Article number	45
Journal	Synthese
Volume	201
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-04030-0
State	Published - 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)

Access to Document

10.1007/s11229-022-04030-0

Cite this

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Disagreement, progress, and the goal of philosophy

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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