What's your point?

I do see what you are saying because philosophy has become more of a closed academic profession. I am not part of the academia so I feel able to open up beyond this.

The brilliance of this site is that it is beyond the fetters of the academic. I was in dialogue about this in another thread and we are not likely to be rewarded by prestige. Therefore, I would say that we can dare touch base with unknown territories and the optimist within myself says that in a world falling apart who knows what could happen to philosophy for worse or better....

I think a measurement of progress in philosophy could be the degree in which questions of a particular domain are classified. We break them down into certain domains, like ethics and metaphysics, which gives some clarity, some hooks to hold on to. These domains are themselves broken down into different camps. So like in metaphysics you have the broad classes like idealism and realism, and subclasses within them, and subclasses within those, etc.

Basically then the measurement of progress in philosophy is the degree in which a person has to start from square one. How many paths have already been taken, that other people can take themselves. If you want to climb a mountain, it helps to have a trail.

I guess the question then becomes, do any of these paths actually lead anywhere? I think sometimes it's enough to simply know what sort of question a question is. Wondering if closing your hand into a fist creates another object by itself is an odd question, but defining it as a mereological question, and clumping it together with other questions of a similar sort makes it less odd. I think eventually you can get to a point where it seems like just about all possible positions in a given domain have been explored, and no further progress is to be made apart from eliminating positions.

Well, if philosophy was pursuing wisdom, finding truth, and there's people that do it for thousands of years, wouldn't you see at least one sufficent answer to any problem in mereology? I mean, we can use other domains of inquiry. Like free will. But that seems somewhat equally confused doesn't it?

It's not even a division between academia/non-academia. Just doing philosophy past asking ordinary existential questions and basic epistemics. Which isn't philosophy, imho. At least I don't think a baker baking bread is philosophy.

Okay, take for example the debate between Idealism and Realism. I think it's highly confused. Nobody believes in the idea of a world completely made of just ideas. (Berkeley's philosophy). You can take a more nuanced form of idealism, such as we see in the German Idealist movement (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), but I think that's really just realism with a few caveats.

I guess the question then becomes, do any of these paths actually lead anywhere? I think sometimes it's enough to simply know what sort of question a question is. Wondering if closing your hand into a fist creates another object by itself is an odd question, but defining it as a mereological question, and clumping it together with other questions of a similar sort makes it less odd. I think eventually you can get to a point where it seems like just about all possible positions in a given domain have been explored, and no further progress is to be made apart from eliminating positions.

But isn't that just frustrating? And make the whole thing seem pretty pointless? I mean, if a problem is so extensive, and has made no progress in thousands of years, wouldn't that be a good reason to think it's irresolvable? Not a priori, but a posteriori evidence suggests it.

Do you think the quest for wisdom in philosophy could be just a dream, a mirage? I'm sympathetic to this. It's absurd to think that 2K years of thinking amounts to just about no discernible progress towards this dream, but then again, that's exactly what has happened. From the outside-in, that's exactly what it looks like. Nothing has been accomplished. It's so hard to believe and it feels like maybe there has to be some kernel of value in it all, but there's just nothing there, it's just a history of thought-spasms.

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the conviction persists–though history shows it to be a hallucination–that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume –an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the "Origin of Species." — John Dewey, The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy

I'm sympathetic to the idea, not sold, yeah. I think there's a sense of when one assumes an "outside-in look", then it seems very pointless as a whole historical structure. And I'm wondering if there is something odd about that "outside-in" look to begin with.

But if I'm in the system, I start creating systems. And I'm sold to systematic philosophy.

I'd have to say that maybe that's partially true.

There's a sense of where logical positivism dropped away seemingly useless metaphysical language, but then, that failed. In came back in metaphysics. There's a sense where, personally, I think older claims like essences, teleology, etc are making some form of come-back in philosophy and aren't dropped away. Some professors in NYU are, you know, concerned with creating a notion of an essence that's nonmodal. They are concerned in ontological grounding. Powers, which are in Aristotle's philosophy, creep back up as a form of modality in-between necessity and possibility in, say, Mumford's theories of causation. There's a way of where philosophy just does cycle.

I get that, sometimes I'm the same way. Other times, it just seems like LARP-ing, dressing up in costumes for fun, "I am a so-and-so who believes in such-and-such, and I really do, I promise I'm not making this up, I'm not just an intellectual dramatist" :shrug:

Are you familiar with the common sense philosophy of David Stone? Flawed man, morally speaking, but had some interesting perspectives on philosophy. A common charge he accused other philosophers of being was disingenuous; saying tongue-in-cheek they believe in something but not actually truly believing it, often from what he observed to be a desire to be as provocative and contrarian as possible, to draw attention to themselves, like a monkey flinging shit.

Most of the time the only value of reading is to better calibrate your sense of what not to read.

Yeah, I'm not sure if people often just pretend to believe in stuff, but that they do believe in stuff that works in a very confused way.

And no, I haven't read him!

Also, I think if we were to just imagine philosophy going down tube, say, 2500 years ago, I think a lot would have change today. Drastically. So, some might do that analysis of the present (as TGW has) where he asks us to imagine a counter-factual reality without philosophy from now. Is anything lost? I don't see a reason why a counter-factual situation like this would look as radically different as the one we just envisioned had we never had philosophy in the first place. He seems to think otherwise. But I don't think there's good a posterori evidence for that.

I think something that tends to happen with philosophy is that you loop back to where you started from, but afterwards you have a better understanding and less anxiety about whatever it was that you initially set off for. It is not a circle but more like a spiral, with the length of the spiral corresponding with your understanding.

This is not just with philosophy, this is just generally the way it is with anything you learn, but it's more apparent with philosophy because nothing seems to get agreed upon in the way it does with facts and theories in the sciences, or best practices in the arts and trades. With math you might learn basic arithmetic, and later down the road you learn about calculus and differential equations, and finally perhaps some abstract algebra, which brings you right back to the basic arithmetic you learned in 1st grade, but this time you have a deeper understanding of things than when you were five.

With Western philosophy there sort of seems to be three different periods, the initial dawning of naive theorizing, the systemic, super-rational philosophy of the scholastics up to the idealists, and then the disillusioned, bitter deconstruction of the failure of everything that happened. I think maybe @180 Proof said something along the lines of this somewhere, but I don't really remember. I could see perhaps philosophy either entering a new phase, or looping back to its initial. Movements for both are happening right now. I think this gives philosophy a somewhat mystical fatalism though, and I've been reading Spengler, so take that with a grain of salt. I'm sort of just rambling right now anyway.

Then again fucks folks like Feser think that underneath the history of philosophy resides a perennial tradition that more or less has got it right. In that case there is a more obvious sense of progress. Then again, maybe just stagnation.