Can philosophy learn?

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Is Philosophy Progressive?

Some say that one of the main differences between science and philosophy is that science makes progress while philosophers go round in circles endlessly discussing the same questions. Toni Vogel Carey isn’t convinced.

George Sarton, a founder of the relatively new field of history of science, speaks for the many in calling science the only discipline that is “obviously and undoubtedly cumulative and progressive.” Once upon a time, people thought that scary, unexpected phenomena like thunder and lightning must be caused by the wrath of the gods. But with Greek civilization came the beginnings of real science: Euclidean geometry, Pythagorean harmonics, Aristotelian biology, Archimedean statics etc. Nearly two millennia separated that golden age from the next one; but since the Scientific Revolution advances have poured forth almost without let-up. Newton united heavens and earth through gravitation; Benjamin Franklin united them through electricity (taming the gods’ wrath with a wave of his lightning rod). Darwin knit together all life systems with the thread of natural selection. Einstein discovered e = mc2. Now physicists are in hot pursuit of a Theory of Everything, an equation for the whole universe as simple as Einstein’s.

The arts are not like the sciences in this way, and don’t aim to be. “Beethoven did not surpass Bach,” says Nobel biologist Francois Jacob, “in the way that Einstein surpassed Newton.” Rather, the arts furnish a plenitude of points of view, reflecting the uniqueness of their makers. They can all express truths, and yet be so different as to be incommensurable.

Philosophy falls somewhere between the arts and sciences. On the one hand, it offers idiosyncratic worldviews that may be too disparate to compare: Hume and Husserl, for example, or Spinoza and Sartre. It is not surprising, then, that the question “Is philosophy progressive?” is hardly ever raised. On the other hand, philosophy, like science, is a quest for truth, and it too requires that we check our theories against what we observe in the external world, or the internal one (sense data, pains, etc.).

A few philosophers, such as Hegel and Herbert Spencer, seem to hold that everything is progressive. But even discounting pessimists and postmodernists, who are unwilling to countenance the idea of progress at all, very few think the history of philosophy shows an overall progressive sweep – getting better, if not day by day, at least century by century. The notion that Wittgenstein’s philosophy surpasses Plato’s seems downright silly.

If what we are asking, though, is whether philosophy is ever progressive, I think the answer is clearly yes; sometimes it is even cumulatively progressive, as Sarton said about science. And I think we could see more progress than we do if philosophers gave more thought to whether what they are writing really moves philosophy forward, or merely adds to the accumulated verbiage.

“Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above… And if the light from above is lacking, I can’t in any case be more than clever.” Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

To be sure, science has its share of false moves and dead-end roads; in fact, according to the philosopher of biology David Hull, most scientific research “fails or leads nowhere.” And science is as vulnerable as any other discipline to influences inimical to the pursuit of truth. For many years Soviet biology was restricted by the state to Lysenko’s notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. More subtle, but in some ways no less dangerous, the ‘Chief Influentials’ in a given field, as Michael Polanyi calls them, are wont to dictate which topics, and which positions on those topics, are ‘interesting’ at any given time, and which mean instant career-death. For much of the twentieth century, the Positivists managed to marginalize whole philosophical disciplines – ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics – as meaningless because unscientific. And of course we are never free from garden-variety resistance to new ideas by those who don’t know any better, and those who should know better. Everyone is aware of Galileo’s troubles with the Church. We don’t hear much, though, about his “earliest conflicts with authority,” which Stillman Drake tells us “had nothing to do with religion;” they were instigated by schoolmen at the University of Pisa who felt threatened by Galileo’s new ideas.

Notwithstanding some egregious examples to the contrary, though, a sweep of scientific progress since 1600 seems undeniable. We tend to attribute this to the discovery and invention of new things; but at least as important has been the ability to perceive old things in new ways. The Aristotelians looked at a swinging body, Thomas Kuhn says, and saw something “falling with difficulty;” Galileo looked at it and saw a pendulum. This aspect of science, which is explanatory and explicatory, sometimes bears a distinct resemblance to philosophical analysis. Cosmologists, for example, conceptualize a galaxy as “particles making up a continuous and perfect fluid;” economists define a ‘product’ as a “collection of units that are perfect substitutes to purchasers.”

Some, like the Positivists, and W.V.O. Quine in his famous paper ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism,’ minimize the difference between science and philosophy. Others, like Wittgenstein and Max Black, emphasize it. As Black points out, facts are things to which “philosophers are, by general consent, professionally indifferent.”

“I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings. So I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists and my way of thinking is different from theirs.” Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

If philosophy resembles science in some respects but not all, we can expect that sometimes progress in philosophy will resemble that in science, and sometimes it won’t. And that expectation is borne out, I think, in the following three examples.

More at: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue59/59carey.htm