Is there progress in philosophy?

There has been some recent chatter about whether there can be progress in philosophy. I’m going to ignore it. Instead, I’ll suggest that philosophy should correct embedded Cartesian errors, revivify the categories of scholastic teleology, and become a safe space within which the evolution of doctrine can find shelter.

What could count as making progress in philosophy, assuming of course that there is such a thing as progress and that philosophy is in the business of making it?

I am (logically) committed to the possibility of progress, because I know that we have seen its opposite. I believe, to take one example, that philosophy in the 17th century went backwards, and became a corruption of more sophisticated habits of thought.

Descartes should take much of the blame for this. The Cartesian system disapplies Final Cause metaphysics from the science of extended substances and thus replaces teleology with mechanism; purpose with contingency. Descartes asks that God stands as guarantor of his rationalist project, only to then expunge him from the record of natural events.

Then there is his forced separation of soul and body, unnecessary given they get along just fine when left to do what they do, in mysterious but effective entwinement. When Descartes concluded that we are two ontologically independent and mysteriously conjoined substances, res cogitans versus res extensa, he introduced the category mistake which continues to waste the time of the philosophers today: the so-called “mind-body” problem.

Here’s the modern form of this problem, expressed as a question: “How is the sensation I am having or the thought that I am having at time t related to my neurological state at time t? ”

The following solutions are then tossed around: that the relation is one of identity or of functional equivalence or of emergence . Some philosophers of mind even argue that there are no sensations or thoughts that we need to worry about, and that we should just get on with developing, deepening and refining the sciences of the brain and behaviour.

Then come the objections to the proposed solutions, which will tend to insist that these omit or cannot account for the phenomenal or felt properties of sensation, nor can they explain the directedness or intentionality of human thought.

A question and collection of replies which arise only within the assumptions of Descartes’ ontologically promiscuous worldview.

The scholastics, following Aristotle, got this one right. There is no ontological divorce possible here. The soul (or mind if you must) is the animating or containing principle of the body. The human person is both things at the same time. The vulnerability of the material body is a point of anxiety for the immaterial soul, which knows that they are both in it together.

It is this scholastic picture that confirms the importance of the mystery of the Resurrection and saves it from regurgitated Neoplatonism or repurposed Gnosticism.

If you are going to make “radical doubt” your basic epistemic axiom, then you go wrong straight away. Scepticism can be like a philosophical Ouija board; it can be an invitation to spiritually mischievous habits of thinking. Those things that Descartes takes himself to know “clearly and distinctly” could in truth be the conclusions of impure ways of reasoning.

Here’s what would count as philosophical progress: to go back to much older ways of thinking about things, and particularly those things relating to the concepts of causality, form and substance. Philosophy is not technology, and there is no reason — beyond the prejudices of scientific materialism — to assume that newer is better.

Philosophy is an activity which involves the making of distinctions, and as with all activities there are better and worse ways of doing it. I’m going to put it out there that scholastic phenomenology — with its distinctions between soul, intellect and will — is intellectually more refined and conceptually more resourceful than its contemporary imitators, which treats soul as mind, mind as consciousness, and consciousness as exclusively passive.

Modern “analytical philosophy”, it might be countered, is all about the drawing of distinctions. This, surely, is what clarity consists in?

There is some truth to this. But this school of philosophy goes too far the other way and confuses means with ends. To put it another way, contemporary philosophy has a habit of making itself its own subject matter. Which is less a search for the truth, and more a sort of (forgive the indelicacy) intellectual onanism.

None of this is to argue that there can be no such thing as progress going forwards over time. Just that this is the exception. I’d welcome it if somebody could give a “modern” account of the mystery of the Eucharist, by redefining the process of transubstantiation using the language of quantum mechanics.

That said, the Catholic mind must concede that philosophy is the handmaiden to theology. As St John Henry Newman showed, doctrine and teaching will develop over time, either as evolution or as corruption.

Progress in philosophy would then look something like this: a correction of the Enlightenment/Cartesian error, in order to move back to the teleological language of a more sophisticated age, so that doctrine can evolve in ways consistent with revelation over time.

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