Philosophy Now Forum

My understanding of progress is that it always interprets history as moving towards a predetermined goal. What’s more, all historical advancement, when correctly implemented throughout society, is benevolent and uplifting, increasing the overall happiness and/or freedom of humankind. By open-ended d...

Unfortunately, all attempts at getting the American government to embark on a career of aiding and abetting freedom fighters the world over failed in the early decades of the American Republic. As the French Revolution supposedly slipped into despotism during the Reign of Terror in 1793-94, it put a...

[Note: This is a Juvenalian satire, very loosely based on a famous 18th century satire written by Jonathan Swift. I wrote it during various periods of pandemic-related lockdown earlier this year, as a means of keeping my mind preoccupied during long stretches of mostly solitary downtime. It was at t...

As a proponent of my God, who has taught me that there are spiritual truths with humanitarian principles to be found in many religions, alternative methodologies to investigating the natural world, and an understanding that we've been blessed with this playground named Earth for eons to better unde...

There's two possibilities: - we continue progressing and most people die - we stop progressing and everyone dies. Why would everyone die if progress is neutralized? The Sun is heating up. In less than a billion years, possibly much less, the Earth's surface will be uninhabitable, certainly for larg...

Hobbes’ Choice wrote: “We might have social media, medicine to make us live to 85, but this does not mean the sum of human fulfilment is greater that it was 100 years ago....” I agree. I think that the prerequisites for happiness and fulfilment are the meeting of basic material needs – food, fresh w...

Arising_uk wrote: “...it does look like certain progressive social ideas are seen in a favourable light around the world, democracy, equality under the law, freedom from slavery, education, etc, even if they are not in place in many countries.” For the most part, I agree with this. No one wants to b...

Progress in technology isn't a myth. But social progress is. How so? We don't have slavery any more, we don't send the kids into the factories, women don't have two choices(I accept that this was not so black and white) marriage or prostitution, women can get an education and work, men have the vot...

Progress in technology isn't a myth. But social progress is. May I challenge you on this, Dalek, by asking to what end is technology progressing towards? Is high technology, like the laptop I’m writing this reply to you on, a permanent or even a potentially permanent technological advance? Or is it...

Intrinsic to a modern mindset is a belief in the idea of progress. In this post I’m going to contend that the idea of progress is a secularized version of a particular strain of religious thought: monotheism. However, unlike the three faith-based Abrahamic monotheisms – Judaism, Christianity and Isl...