How philosophy makes progress
Back in 2009 I took up my first academic post in philosophy, as Department Chair at the City University of New York’s Lehman College. Until the previous semester I had been a professor of evolutionary biology, most recently at Stony Brook University.
One of the first things I noticed about my new colleagues — in the discipline at large, not just my particular Department — was that a good number of them had a peculiar tendency to denigrate their own discipline, something a scientist would rarely, if ever, do. After all, if you are a biologist, or a physicist, and you think your field doesn’t make progress and is largely useless, the obvious question becomes: why are you still there? Many philosophers, however, appear to be able to live with the seemingly cognitive dissonance-inducing twin thoughts that what they do is useless and yet somehow fulfilling.
One such philosopher appears to be Chris Daly, from the University of Manchester, UK. Not long ago he wrote a piece for Aeon magazine entitled “Philosophy’s lack of progress.” The tagline says: “For centuries, all philosophers seem to have done is question and debate. Why do philosophical problems resist solution?” The problem is that Daly, as many of his colleagues, seems to be affected by serious misconceptions about the nature of his own discipline and of what counts as progress in it.
