The “lack of progress” in philosophy comes down to this. By the time of Socrates or Confucius, there had already been a lifetime’s worth of philosophical thought done that you needed to grapple with. Everyone since then has necessarily had to let something slip through in order to move forward at all.
I think we sometimes understate philosophy's progress: it's certainly not measurable in decades, but the world of 2022 looks very different (in terms of philosophical priors and their consequences) than the world of Socrates or Confucius. A handful of examples that come to mind:
* (Nearly) everybody on our planet lives under a government whose fundamental structure and right to power comes from modern (meaning 17th century) political philosophy.
* Everybody posting on this board is using a machine that only existed in the mind games (and works) of math philosophers just over a century ago.
* The philosophical foundations for contemporary science are very young, practically within living memory. Popper died less than 30 years ago!
Pinning concepts like "science" and "freedom" to a specific era is a silly endeavor. But if you had to, neither would originate in Christian Europe: science as a concept predates Christianity by at least 800 years; the thing we call "freedom" today didn't take shape until 1600 years into Christian Europe's development.
Christianity, like just about every religion, has made invaluable contributions to philosophy. But it's ahistorical, to an embarrassing degree, to attribute such broad concepts and bodies of inquiry to it.
Without philosophy, there is no Hegel, without Hegel there is no Marx, without Marx there is no Lenin, without Lenin, there is no Stalin, without Stalin there is no Cold War, without the Cold War there's probably not a war in Ukraine right now, and without a war in Ukraine I wouldn't be worried about my gas bill. I think that's pretty concrete.
(Just a single, rather obvious example. Easy enough to find others.)
Each of the examples I gave have direct origins in philosophy. It’s not even clear what the alternative would be for Hobbes and Popper; for Frege you could call him a mathematician instead, I suppose, if you ignore all of the other philosophy he did.
The causality here is hard to prove, even untangle. I think the French Revolution was largely more influential for the state of governments today. I also think that science was not influenced so much by Popper, but much more by Fisher and Neyman.
People tend to use what is a successful tool, and be influenced by power and theatre, not so much by fragile logical constructs without empirical value found sitting in the armchair.
Do you think the French Revolution happened in a vacuum? Without the ideals of Enlightenment philosophy it would have amounted to nothing more than mob violence (if it had even gotten started at all).
Good point, I agree that it did not. Were those ideas however progress, or a tool that the Committee of Public Safety used because it fit their agenda?
Was this philosophy finding truth that guided policy, or was it making up rhetorical arguments in a power struggle on behalf of the rising middle class and its policy?
In absence of criteria of non empirical truth that are independent of the very non empirical truths they are criteria for I tend to believe the latter.
In addition to this inherent weakness philosophical arguments are not for the masses anyways. Not even philosophers usually agree what they mean or entail. How could those idea(l)s have guided the revolution as more than just superficial self justification?
Remember that the enemies of the French Revolution had their philosophers too, they just lost.
Historical events usually have very mundane reasons, class struggles, geopolitics etc. Ideas may play a part too. But I believe not in the sense that they are the horses in front of the cart.
Well, the original point was whether philosophy had any influence on world events, not whether that influence was good or not.
To me, the idea that ideas don't play a major role in world history and politics seems odd. There's nothing more fundamentally human than trying to understand the world around you and wanting to shape it in a certain way. Of course material conditions are important; the French Revolution wouldn't have happened had the state not gone bankrupt. But it also wouldn't have happened in that way without Enlightenment ideas. Very basic principles of the revolution, some of which were kept by Napoleon and in subsequent generations and still live on today were formulated by those enlightenment thinkers. Just consider the declaration of human rights.
I understood the thread roughly this way: „philosophy makes progress. The evidence is that the modern world has adopted the more progressed rules of enlightement and scientific rules.“
And my reply was that this is highly questionable.
I’m saying that the enlightenment ideas happened because the uprising middle class needed justifications in their power struggle. Not that the ideas formed a middle class that then acted upon them.
I agree with you that humans need ideas to tell a story of themselves. And that story better paint them as good! But that story is usually not the driving force.
So I fail to see progress as I don’t see a criterion to measure progress (in general. Aristoteles‘ logic is a tool. Here I see how to compare it to FOL and judge which is better or worse for specific use cases).
As for human rights: do I agree with them? Yes! Can I justify them? No! Do I know where to exactly draw the lines when two rights collide? No! Is it important to justify them in a philosophical way? I doubt.
I don’t see any direct origins. Karl Popper was a small child when Einstein came up with relativity. Hobbes was just a reactionary apologist of absolute monarchy. And Frege’s philosophical contributions were world-changing as long as we can pretend that propositional calculus is philosophy.
I don’t think this is going to be productive, but to be clear: the claim isn’t that science didn’t exist before Popper, or that Popper somehow gets credit for all of science. It’s that Popper has produced the best description of science’s epistemic underpinnings thus far, allowing science to progress without imploding under the demands of positivism. In other words: when we “do” science, the epistemic model we use is less than a century old.
The claim that propositional calculus is in the domain of philosophy and mathematics is not controversial in either domain. Nor is it unusual: the history of philosophy is the history of discharging subjects once they develop a field of their own.
> It’s that Popper has produced the best description of science’s epistemic underpinnings thus far, allowing science to progress without imploding under the demands of positivism
I am not sure what that claim means precisely. Popper saved science from… a certain group of philosophers?
> when we “do” science, the epistemic model we use is less than a century old
The epistemic model is whatever the scientist in question uses. One can be a Popperian, another can claim they are guided by God, and someone else would just say “shut up and calculate.”
Popper didn’t like Bohr and his Copenhagen interpretation from the philosophical standpoint yet he didn’t deny that Bohr was a good physicist.
> The claim that propositional calculus is in the domain of philosophy and mathematics is not controversial in either domain. Nor is it unusual: the history of philosophy is the history of discharging subjects once they develop a field of their own.
The context of this discussion is that philosophy progresses over time. You cannot say that it progresses just because we put a label “philosophy” on every new thing that isn’t formalized yet. In that trivial sense, of course, philosophy had great progress; especially in its subfield of natural philosophy also known nowadays as science. But did Frege really stand on the shoulders of Hegel, Spinoza and Kant and improved on their ideas?
> Popper has produced the best description of science’s epistemic underpinnings thus far
Ok, sure.
> allowing science to progress without imploding under the demands of positivism
How is giving a description of something necessary for its continued progress? Were people not having sex before evolutionary psychologists and biologists elucidated how and why?
I second your other two points but I think this one is inaccurate:
> * (Nearly) everybody on our planet lives under a government whose fundamental structure and right to power comes from modern (meaning 17th century) political philosophy.
A large number of countries are ruled by dictators and their close supporters. Sometimes they position themselves within the boundaries of a more or less modern ideology but ultimately care only about being the one in command and use that ideology as lipstick. This is a straight continuation of prehistory, not something stemming from 17th century.
I meant more the structure of and justification for the state and sovereign, not liberal ideology. You’re absolutely right that a large number of people don’t live under the latter.
What is most annoying is: many of the dictators were installed by "democracies" so that these can continue their unsustainable lifestyles, at the expense of extreme suffering elsewhere.
...and I disagree with the parent's parent's point on progress in philosophy: all three examples are not progress of philosophy but at best influence or application of it, and in the last case did not involve trained/professional philosophers (e.g. Turing was a mathematician/chemist-turned-cryptoanalyst/computer scientist).
We measure philosophy success relative to finding the meaning of life. On the other hand everybody agrees that computers have advanced enormously without achieving yet AGI.
which lack of progress? The few encounters with logic (in a philosophical sense, although it feels more "mathy") I had recently were all more recent works, certainly more recent than a large part of math I use!
