How philosophy makes progress

[image: La Rue du Progrès, the road to progress, in the city of Le Locle, canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland (Wikimedia)]

Back in 2009 I took up my first academic post in philosophy, as Department Chair at the City University of New York’s Lehman College. Until the previous semester I had been a professor of evolutionary biology, most recently at Stony Brook University.

One of the first things I noticed about my new colleagues — in the discipline at large, not just my particular Department — was that a good number of them had a…