Does Philosophy Make Progress, or Are We Asking the Wrong Question?

The answer depends on what we mean by "progress".

Apr 14, 2026

Philosophy appears to make no progress. After posting a paper by Eric Dietrich on Twitter about this, I noticed that the topic is very popular and divisive. So, naturally, I figured it would be a good subject for my first Substack post. Whether or not philosophy makes progress is a difficult question to answer, since asking the question inevitably smuggles in a bunch of contestable philosophical claims.

What do we even mean by progress? Dietrich compares it to the progress made in modern physics. But we could contest that comparison, since philosophy doesn’t seem to be in the game of making verifiable or falsifiable predictions. Dietrich could push back, though, and say that the indicator of progress is convergence among experts, which is sorely lacking in philosophy. There isn’t an expert consensus among professional philosophers about almost anything, although some may argue otherwise, pointing to Gettier’s alleged refutation of the justified true belief definition of knowledge. However, some philosophers contest even that claim.

Another issue many people contest is what counts as philosophy. When we argue over progress in philosophy, we assume there is a cleanly demarcated subject we call “philosophy”. The existence of philosophy departments seems to support the claim that philosophy is a distinct subject; after all, they have specific classes like ethics and metaphysics where they discuss topics we all agree are distinctively philosophical. They have peer-reviewed journals that demarcate themselves by subject-matter. You can’t publish just anything in those journals (allegedly), so there must be a distinct subject that counts as philosophy. But many contest even this.

The argument goes like this: of course there’s progress in philosophy, we just stop calling those topics that make progress “philosophy”. Once physics started making progress, for instance, it stopped being considered part of philosophy. Computer science and mathematical logic are other examples people bring up. All of these subjects have roots in philosophical traditions, but no longer “count” as philosophy, mainly because they have their own specialized journals, university departments, and conferences. This is a very common view I encounter. Philosophy makes progress by spawning new, productive subjects and the alleged lack of philosophical progress is an illusion brought on by institutional demarcation. One objection to this view of progress is that it sets aside the perennial philosophical questions that never seem to morph into their own fields of study. The nature and existence of abstract objects or the problem of universals do not strike me as the sorts of subjects that will branch off of philosophy in the way other fields did.

Some people argue that philosophical progress as linear is a myth, maybe some sort of Whig history. Instead, philosophical progress is a bumpy ride, without a clear line of progress. But we’ve made progress, like the arguments for abolishing slavery, the rise of enlightenment values informing the constitutions of nation states, and our ability to make our thinking more precise with various forms of logic that were formalized in the 20th century. The pessimist may respond to this by pointing to the perennial problems that have not reached the level of consensus that arguments for abolishing slavery have. So maybe there’s still a core set of philosophical problems that haven’t been solved, or are possibly impossible to solve. This doesn’t strike me as a decisive argument against the non-linear progress view, though, as those may just be the hardest problems that have yet to be solved.

Maybe we don’t make progress in philosophy because that isn’t the point of doing philosophy. Perhaps philosophy is a sustained conversation among humans about issues that we will inevitably face, regardless of what year it is. Progress could be a mislabeling of how these conversations progress in light of the changing world around us. There may always be debates about the nature and existence of abstract objects, universals, knowledge, morality, vagueness, etc. because these are topics that do not admit of clean answers you find in other fields. These may be perennial questions we will never truly answer beyond mapping the space of reasons that different perspectives can occupy. But this doesn’t strike me as a satisfying response. Why can’t we answer the questions? Did we evolve to ask them but not to answer them? Maybe our minds just can’t grasp the right answers, like the mysterians argue for the hard problem of consciousness.

Another issue to flag is that the question of philosophical progress strikes me as itself a philosophical problem that we are trying to make progress on in these debates. If the pessimists are right, then they may have a self-defeating position on their hands, as they’ve tried to make progress in a field they claim does not make progress. I’m sure there are ways around this, as there are for almost every claim of self-defeat within philosophy, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

As you can tell, I don’t have a settled view on the topic of progress. I have always found it interesting but I’ve never settled into a specific camp because my intuitions about this are not very determinate. Some days I find myself agreeing with the non-linear progress camp, and other days I think that the institutional capture of the subject may be responsible for this, making it a pseudo-problem.

One view I like is deflationary. Philosophy could be a form of intellectual autobiography. Maybe philosophy doesn’t make progress in the way people think it should because the point of doing philosophy is to develop your intellectual autobiography through struggling with the problems you find most interesting. In doing this, you map your own worldview over time through conversations and engagement with texts written by others engaged in the same autobiographical process. Progress, on this view, may be something within the individual rather than a consensus or convergence among experts.

What this survey suggests is that the question of philosophical progress depends on a set of assumptions that must be made explicit. Whether philosophy makes progress will look very different depending on whether we take progress to be convergence, problem-solving, institutional differentiation, or something more individual. Unless those assumptions are clarified, the debate risks talking past itself.

There’s some interesting work on progress in philosophy worth checking out if you find this topic worth incorporating into your own intellectual autobiography. Here’s a few books and articles I enjoyed to get you started:

John Christmann's Substack

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