{"id":11238,"date":"2010-10-11T13:00:06","date_gmt":"2010-10-11T13:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/10\/11\/the-history-of-philosophy-as-akin-to-an-intellectual-arms-race\/"},"modified":"2010-10-11T13:00:06","modified_gmt":"2010-10-11T13:00:06","slug":"the-history-of-philosophy-as-akin-to-an-intellectual-arms-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/10\/11\/the-history-of-philosophy-as-akin-to-an-intellectual-arms-race\/","title":{"rendered":"The History of Philosophy as Akin to an Intellectual Arms Race"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Nicholas Rescher, <em>The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications of Philosophical Diversity <\/em>(University of Pittsburg Press, 1985), pp. 205-206:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify; padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">The history of philosophy is akin to an intellectual arms race where all sides escalate the technical bases for their positions.&#0160; As realists sophisticate their side of the argument, idealists sophisticate their counterarguments; as materialists become more subtle, so do phenomenalists, and so on.&#0160; At the level of basics, the same old positions continue to contest the field &#8212; albeit that ever more powerful weapons are used to defend increasingly sophisticated positions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">The context is an argument for the thesis that philosophy is susceptible of technical but not doctrinal progress.&#0160; The nature of philosophy precludes consensus.&#0160; Resolution of &quot;the substantive issues in such as way as to secure general approbation and assent&quot; (206) is out of the question.&#0160;Such consensus is impossible and therefore not even an ideal.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\"><em>Strife of Systems <\/em>is essential reading for anyone interested in metaphilosophy.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications of Philosophical Diversity (University of Pittsburg Press, 1985), pp. 205-206: The history of philosophy is akin to an intellectual arms race where all sides escalate the technical bases for their positions.&#0160; As realists sophisticate their side of the argument, idealists sophisticate their &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/10\/11\/the-history-of-philosophy-as-akin-to-an-intellectual-arms-race\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The History of Philosophy as Akin to an Intellectual Arms Race&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[454,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-of-philosophy","category-metaphilosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}