What philosophers think, 2020 edition

[image: the “Thinker” by Rodin outside Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, Wikimedia]

Philosophy, contra popular opinion (even among some philosophers) makes progress. I have written a whole (free!) book (summarized here) about how that works. The basic idea is that philosophy, unlike science, is in the business of discovering, exploring, and refining conceptual landscapes defined by the questions in which philosophers are interested in.

For instance, if the issue is the articulation of frameworks for thinking about moral philosophy, the corresponding landscape includes a number of peaks that identify virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, ethics of care, etc.. Progress then consists of first of all identifying new peaks in the landscape. Utilitarianism, for example, did not exist until Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill put it on the map in the early 19th century. Subsequently, progress consists of exploring and refining a given peak: Mill’s version of utilitarianism was more sophisticated than Bentham’s, and various modern varieties of the philosophy are more sophisticated than Mill’s.

But do we have any empirical evidence that this is the way philosophy works? Yes, from two major sources. One, of course, is the history of philosophy itself, as recently argued by my colleague Peter Adamson. Another is to periodically survey professional philosophers about what they think of the major questions in their field and see if the results…