Toni Vogel Carey, writing in Philosophy Now, feels that philosophers are not making any progress. They are just arguing over the same questions. What Carey is questioning is why can’t philosophers be more like scientists and achieve progress?

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.).

via arts & letters daily