Progress in Philosophy

Kirjoittajat

• Ilkka Niiniluoto Helsingin yliopisto

Abstrakti

Philosophy is literally the oldest of “academic” subjects. In medieval universities it served as a “maiden of theology”, but in modern research universities it gained an important position as an independent scholarly discipline with its own curriculum, journals, societies, and congresses. But still many critics have claimed that philosophy is merely speculative contemplation of eternally unsolved problems without genuine progress. Today there is a lively discussion of the relevance of rival accounts of scientific progress to the issue about philosophical progress. While skeptics deny that philosophy makes progress or achieve it less than science, optimists claim that philosophers successfully solve big problems despite their mutual disagreements. In my inaugural lecture (author 1984), I defended the view that philosophy makes progress by the Socratic method: problematization, explication, and argumentation. As questions, concepts, and arguments do not have truth values, and many philosophical theories are axiological and normative stances rather than factual claims about the world, philosophy does not typically accumulate knowledge. But this not a reason for pessimism: philosophy is largely different from empirical science yet a progressive discipline.