Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Philosophical Progress
ISBN: 9780198802099
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Philosophy General Metaphysics/ Epistemology;

Many people believe that philosophy makes no progress. Members of the general public often find it amazing that philosophers exist in universities at all, at least in research positions. Academics who are not philosophers often think of philosophy either as a scholarly or interpretative enterprise, or else as a sort of pre-scientific speculation. And - amazingly - many well-known philosophers argue that there is little genuine progress inphilosophy. Daniel Stoljar argues that this is all a big mistake. He defends a reasonable optimism about philosophical progress. Optimistic, because he argues that, contrary to widespread belief, we havecorrectly answered philosophical questions in the past and therefore should expect to do so in the future. Reasonable, because his optimism does not extend to every instance of the sort of problem called 'philosophical' or even to every sub-kind of that sort of problem. He offers a credible vision of how philosophy works.