Philosophy's Future by Russell Blackford Damien Broderick & Damien Broderick

Author:Russell Blackford,Damien Broderick & Damien Broderick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119210108
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chalmers’ glass‐half‐empty thesis would more aptly be named a glass‐not‐quite‐but‐almost‐empty thesis. Chalmers is clearly of the view that there has not been enough progress in philosophy, and this lack of progress, characterized by a lack of consensus around the biggest problems in the discipline, is in his view “the largest disappointment in the practice of philosophy.”

This pessimism about philosophy’s progress from within the discipline is not a recent phenomenon. The perception of failure by philosophers can be seen one hundred years ago, soon after the birth of analytic philosophy. Arthur Lovejoy made the following observations as part of his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association in 1916:

I well remember, as undergraduate[s] … we were told that one of the conventional reproaches against philosophy is that it merely moves in cycles – that there is neither stability in philosophic opinion nor continuous progress in philosophic insight, but that the speculative fashion of one generation becomes a discredited error to the next, and returns to vogue (perhaps with the air of a new discovery) in a third … But if we fail to achieve a measurable amount of agreement and a consecutive and cumulative progress there, we fail altogether … The fact [that we don’t] remains, then, a standing scandal to philosophy, bringing just discredit upon the entire business in which we are professionally engaged.

(Lovejoy 1917, 126–130)

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