>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: So is there any philosophical progress?
>> JOHN CHRISTMAN: What does progress mean in knowledge?
Is there progress in science?
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>> JOHN LACHS: The science of physics today is obviously ahead of where the science of
physics was fifty years ago. Or a hundred years ago. There's no question about that.
>> JOHN CHRISTMAN: Well, that depends. In some ways, yes, but with Kuhn and others the
question of what progress in science really comes to is more complicated.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: I think one of the reasons why there's been a rebirth in interest in
Peirce and a rebirth in interest in pragmatism is that this new conception of Peirce and
pragmatism works reasonably well with the inherited analytic model.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: But analytic philosophy with its scientistic dogmas of progress and
the close kinship of philosophy and the sciences
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: There is a, a kind of , of vision about solving problems...and it works
very well in medicine and it works very well in physics.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: analytic philosophy has so divorced itself from the problems of men,
as John Dewey put it
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: You know, this sort of realism. Philosophy's job is to find out
what is true.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: Philosophers talking to other philosophers, bottled up in their little
world, their little bubble of what constitutes the dominant members of the APA.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: And that's not the model of James. That's not the model of Dewey.
That's not the model of Emerson, Franklin. But it's the model that philosophy seems
to have adopted. So our job is to find out what is true.
>> JOHN STUHR: William James essentially says that there can never be a final philosophy.
There can never be a finished philosophy. That the mark of adequacy of any philosophy
is that it has to find a room for somebody else's experience.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: But it doesn't work very well in poetry.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: It's a little bit like has music improved since Mozart.
Well, no one's going to beat Mozart or Bach, but now we have Brahms and Beethoven. I don't
know if they're better than Mozart, but I'm sure glad we have them.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: And it doesn't work very well in philosophy. Or in painting.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: The progress. I've just said no one's better than Plato but we have
a lot of other people to look at, so we have Plato but we also have Kant and Descartes
and Emerson to think of, and that's certainly a good thing..
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: We did that sculpture. We know that one's done so we don't need
to do that one again. So, it's a different kind of discipline.
>> JOHN CHRISTMAN: The questions philosophers pursue are of a different order than scientific
questions, so how should we live, what can I know, not just what do I know, are so abstract
and basic and fundamental that the idea of answering them and therefore the idea of making
progress seems the wrong yardstick to use.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: New issues come up. We think about ways of dealing with them. But
you never get to the point where this particular issue is now buried.
>> VINCENT COLAPIETRO: It seems to me that one of the crucial aims or responsibilities
of the scholar, of the thinker, is to recollect and recollect not in some passionless and
neutral manner, but to recollect in an engaged and passionate way.
>> VICTOR KESTENBAUM: I tend to think that when we attend and attend with more precision
and more imagination, when we as Thoreau says, when we are able to, how does he put it, when
we are able to have a true sauntering of the eye, so that you take in things, you are receptive
in maybe some Heideggerian sense. That could be, that could be for a person, for a group,
that could open avenues of consideration, of reflection that were closed.
>> JOHN CHRISTMAN: If one asks is there progress in philosophy, I think you can say yes, in
at least this way, that we can see what certain roads lead to and some of them are cul-de-sacs.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: Part of what you do when you study philosophy is you study some wrong
turns.
>> JOHN LACHS: When you realize that there are so many philosophical positions that have
debunked and appropriately so that are just not to be taken seriously, then surely we
have made some headway in eliminating those positions.
>> HILARY PUTNAM: In the time of James and Dewey, just defending the idea that, which
is still maybe the majority position in philosophy, that the so-called secondary qualities like
color are in some way in our minds or they're just powers in the object to produce certain
sensations in our minds and Russell and James and James and Dewey and then Russell following,
he said James in 1915 were attacking that.
But today I would say most workers in philosophy of perception in one way or another have something
good to say about that used to be called naïve realism.
Some say in so many words what they're trying to do is defend naïve realism and now we've
moved to the next question which is, well how do you defend it? Which version of it?
How do you work it out? Which was not even on the agenda.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: Part of the progress is maybe getting some names for or learning where
you might be tempted to make some bad moves in philosophy.
I think we've gotten better at finding those. I don't know.
>> JOHN LACHS: We know what views to avoid like the plague because they've been shown,
on the whole, to be tenable if you want to knock yourself out and you don't care about
the consequences, but otherwise quite untenable.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: As we put forward more ideas and theories, we also have refutations
or more refutations or we see some of the inadequacies of some of the positions and
approaches, so I think we're more experienced as a culture.
>> JOHN LACHS: But does that mean that we are at the truth or near the truth about a
variety of important issues? I don't think so. And I'm not sure that that kind of unequivocal,
single-answer truth can be expected in philosophy in the first place.
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