Chris Daly's 2 awkward facts

Chris Daly says- 

HERE ARE TWO AWKWARD FACTS about philosophy: no philosophical problems have been solved and philosophers can’t agree about anything beyond that.

The basic philosophical problem is 'how to make a living- better yet a career- one with a medical plan and pension benefits- out of the sort of stuff Plato, who set up an Academy, and Aristotle, a Lyceum, gassed on about?' It has been solved. That's why Daly and the guys he is talking about are getting paid. 

It would be nice to think that, if a University stopped paying its Philosophy faculty, there would be even one Philosopher who would not agree that the University was being very wicked. Suppose the University said 'we will pay you with air-kisses. They are just as valuable as dollars'. Would there be a single member of the philosophy profession who would agree to this proposition? 

No. Ergo Daly is lying. 

The two truly awkward facts about Liberal Arts' shite pedants get paid to peddle are: firstly, it solves no problems- otherwise its votaries do themselves out of jobs; and, secondly, pedants can only agree on not unanimously admitting this fact so as not to do themselves out of jobs. 

The contrast with the natural sciences is evident: many scientific problems have been solved

so bigger ones can be tackled and tech can get yet cooler and more productive of wealth and utility 

and there is appreciable agreement between scientists in scientific matters.

No. There is more disagreement w.r.t open questions. This is because Science more than pays for itself- i.e. is not rent-seeking simply- and thus there is no point enforcing a barrier to entry. A patent clerk could become the World's top Theoretical Physicist if he takes a novel tack and hits on something promising. 

At one time, this was true of Philosophy too. But then it became Credentialist in an adversely selective way because the Knowledge- as opposed to Epistemically Rent-Seeking- Economy took off. 

What is wrong with philosophy and what is wrong with philosophers?

They won't, they can't, admit they are shit. 

There are various closely related questions here that do not quite come to the same thing. There’s the question of why no philosophical problems have been solved.

Tarski has explained this. The 'primitive' terms of a discourse must be undefined otherwise there is an infinite regress. No philosopher has stood against Tarski on this. True, Kripke gave a workaround, but it would involve having the reasoning capacity of a pigeon.  

There’s also the question of why there’s been no appreciable progress in philosophy.

It's because refugees from other disciplines- e.g. Amartya Sen from Development Econ- barge in and resurrect old fallacies. Daly thinks Sen is a 'profound' thinker. But, this was not 'intellectual affirmative action'. Arrow, Tarski's student, created an availability cascade based on defining a Tarskian primitive- viz. Dictator- as something which obviously was the opposite of a fucking Dictator and, moreover, which would actually be, his brother-in-law, Samuelson's, if not omniscient, then bien pensant, Benthamite planner. Sen did point out to Arrow that Szpilrajn's Extension theorem meant he and his wife's sister's hubby weren't really at odds. Yet, this foolish tiff 'twixt Nobel Laureates persisted for reasons wholly Hebraic- sharing a shvigger is a heavy yoke only if you are as teamed oxen not snake and mongoose-  and the resulting shanda fur dei goyim sealed Sen and thus Nussbaum etc to but Dialethia's doom, Athena's abortion, Sarasvati's suicide.