Talk:Philosophical progress

message: Instrumental optimism should not be presented as a "synthesis" of pessimism and reasoned optimism. Logically, it is one side of a dichotomy between two different views, both of which conclude that even though philosophy is incapable of scientific progress, philosophy still has value. This dichotomy is between whether that value is intrinsic or extrinsic. Hence, a reasoned optimist believes that philosophy has intrinsic value, and an instrumental optimist believes that philosophy has extrinsic value. Furthermore, these two different views can be fruitfully combined, since they are not mutually incompatible. 
--Susurrus 23:57, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

message: The following section seems perfectly useless to this article. It could have been included at the end of any article whatsoever about philosophy. I have therefore deleted it, but am including it here, in case someone wants to develop it further into a proper article of its own:
:Philosophers are somewhat notorious for pursuing discussions to the point that even the most simple concepts take on the rarefied air of paradox, and the whole discussion collapses into a self-referential hall of mirrors. The fate of this article is no different; indeed, now it is even falling into self-referentiality about its own self-referentiality. But there is an important lesson contained in this about the nature of philosophical disputes: they exhibit their own peculiar sort of what Jean-Paul Sartre called "absolute inwardness:" every attempt to resolve a philosophical dispute essentially entangles us in disputes about the nature of philosophy itself. Meta-philosophical reflections on the nature of philosophy and the possibility of philosophical progress are not specialized side-notes to other philosophical work, but rather are involved in--and themselves involve--key debates in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and the theory of value. It may seem like philosophy is stuck with a terrible burden, if it is expected to explain itself as well as its subject-matter at every turn. But appearances may be deceiving: things may not be as weird as they seem. As Ludwig Wittgenstein was fond of pointing out, it may not be that remarkable that you use the same methods even when you philosophize about philosophy itself: "When you are learning spelling, 'SPELLING' is one of the words that you learn to spell. But you don't speak of 'spelling of the second-order.'"
--Susurrus 00:22, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lessons for Philosophy and Metaphilosophy 

message: I took the following excerpt from the section titled "Philosophy as intrinsically worthy." I have italicized my concern.
:The perceived need for philosophy to prove itself in terms of some sort of scientific-technical progress is often diagnosed as a sort of creeping scientism, and repudiated as a drastic oversimplification of our intellectual life. This may have been the position of Ludwig Wittgenstein against the Vienna positivists--<I>although if Wittgenstein saw any intrinsic value in philosophical inquiry he certainly didn't think that most people could profit from it</I>.
This doesn't appear to be saying much. If philosophy is intrinsically worthy—i.e. is good in itself—then the question of people profiting from it is nonsense. From another point of view, furthermore, the discussion here precludes extrinsic worth—i.e. a good for some other end—so "profit" is meaningless. Perhaps the writer had a point, but I can't tell what it is. It probably deserves to be rewritten, either by the original author, or by someone else who knows Wittgenstein.
Vorpal Suds 21:23, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarity needed 

message: I think a lot of the material in this article is good.  But more detailed citation of specific sources would make the present article sound more like an objective encyclopedia article and less like a personal essay.  Some of the stuff in the article sound more like personal musings on the topic than like views and arguments that philosophers have acutally explicitly formulated. Isokrates 21:48, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sources 

message: I am working on Metaphilosophy and copying some content from this article into our section on progress in philosophy. The bulk of this article appears to be about progress in philosophy, however, here and there, mostly in the lede, it seems to be about the concept of progress in general. The Progress disambiguation page says that this page is about progress in general, but it doesn't appear to be so.
I would like to suggest that this article be moved/renamed to "Progress in philosophy", and either a new article created under this name on progress as a philosophical concept, or, since Philosophy of history is already mostly about progress, just put a disambiguation header at the top redirecting people to Philosophy of history for a treatment on progress in general.
I'm going to do the latter now, but wait for comments before moving. --Pfhorrest (talk) 08:17, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is this article about?