Wisdom Of The Week

• A better understanding of man’s relation to the (non-human) animals.
• Many ways of thinking about the environment — not all of them correct — have flowered only in relatively recent times.
• Economics, and what we have learned from economic imperialism, including its failures.
• Singapore, and in fact most other places/polities in the world.
• Most literary works are understood much better today than they were in earlier eras.
• Musical languages are far better developed and better understood.

- Tyler's question - Has there been progress in philosophy?

And Agnes Callard's reply:

• So you are pretty much constantly thinking thoughts that, in one way or another, you inherited from philosophers. You don’t see it, because philosophical exports are the kinds of thing that, once you internalize them, just seem like the way things are. So the reason to read Aristotle isn’t (just) that he’s a great philosopher, but that he’s colonized large parts of your mind.
• It is not the point of philosophy to end philosophy, to ‘solve’ the deep questions so that people can stop thinking about them.  It is the point of people to think about these questions, and the job of philosophers to rub their faces in that fact.  Of all of philosophy’s achievements, perhaps the greatest one is just sticking around in the face of the fact that, from day one, anyone who has plumbed the depths of our ambitions has either joined us or … tried to silence, stop or kill us.  This is an “old debate” indeed.