Why Can't Philosophers Answer the Big Questions?

Philosophy has been around for over two thousand years, yet its central questions remain remarkably unsettled. We still debate whether we have free will, whether morality is objective, whether knowledge is possible, and whether political authority can be justified. These are not newly discovered puzzles. They are the same enduring questions that occupied Plato, Aristotle, and countless others since.

This lack of convergence has led many to doubt whether philosophy makes progress.¹ Scientific inquiry builds on previous discoveries, resolves disagreements through empirical testing, and gradually eliminates error. Philosophy, by contrast, seems to foster endless disagreement. There is no widely accepted body of philosophical truths. No shared method reliably produces consensus. For every argument, there is a counterargument that reasonable people endorse. Even basic terms like “freedom,” “justice,” or “truth” remain deeply contested.

Perhaps most worryingly, philosophers cannot even agree on what they are investigating (whether it is our concepts or the world itself), how they should investigate it (through empirical data, intuitions, or something else), or what would even count as a successful answer (a compelling theory, a precise definition, a reflective equilibrium?).

Of course, not everyone accepts this bleak picture. Some argue that philosophy does make progress, and that certain core questions have been resolved.² I won’t attempt to refute that view here. I’m happy to grant that philosophy progresses in some important ways: it clarifies distinctions, refines arguments, deepens conceptual frameworks, eliminates implausible theories, and illuminates problems more sharply than before.³ But nevertheless, I’ll assume that philosophy has not resolved its most foundational questions. The issues at the heart of the discipline—questions about consciousness, freedom, morality, knowledge, and authority—remain as open as ever.

In this post, I want to explore why these questions seem to be irresolvable. Why do philosophical problems resist resolution in the first place? (A word of warning: this is a long piece, but I want to be as thorough as I can. If you make it to the end and think I’ve missed a plausible explanation for philosophy’s irresolvability problem, let me know in the comments.)

The Spin-Off Theory

The most common and most optimistic explanation for philosophy’s lack of convergence is what I’ll call the Spin-Off Theory. On this view, philosophy looks irresolvable not because it fails to make progress, but because it succeeds. The central idea is that once a philosophical question becomes tractable (i.e. once we develop the tools to answer it clearly, decisively, and with stable consensus), it ceases to be considered a philosophical question. Instead, it spins off into a new domain and becomes the foundation of a distinct science.

This view is famously expressed in Bertrand Russell’s remark: “as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science.”⁴ Historically, this has some plausibility. Physics, biology, economics, psychology, and linguistics all began as branches of philosophy. Over time, they developed empirical tools and methodological norms that allowed their questions to be answered with greater clarity and reliability. David Chalmers refers to this process as “disciplinary speciation,” in which new fields “spring forth from philosophy.”⁵ On this view, philosophy is not failing to settle questions; it is simply shedding the ones it has successfully answered.

What makes the Spin-Off Theory attractive is that it explains both philosophy’s historical importance and its apparent lack of convergence. Unfortunately, I don’t find this theory very plausible.

To begin with, philosophy doesn’t deserve credit for the questions solved by modern science, and scientists have not solved what are genuinely philosophical problems. Psychology has illuminated many aspects of human cognition and behavior, but it has not resolved the mind-body problem. Linguistics provides sophisticated tools for describing language, but it hasn’t answered the hardest questions about meaning.⁶ The most enduring philosophical questions—about consciousness, free will, moral obligation, political legitimacy, and the nature of truth—remain as contested as ever. These are not simply unanswered; they show no signs of migrating to disciplines where empirical tools might apply. And perhaps they never will. These may not be the kinds of questions science is equipped to answer at all.

To see why this is so, it helps to look more closely at what distinguishes scientific inquiry from philosophical inquiry. In The Knowledge Machine, Michael Strevens argues that the power of modern science lies in a radical methodological restriction he calls “the iron rule of explanation.” This rule directs scientists to resolve their disputes solely by appealing to empirical testing. It is “a prohibition on any form of persuasion, however well founded, however objective, that is not based on empirical testing.” Even the most elegant argument, the most plausible intuition, or the most rigorous conceptual analysis counts for nothing in science unless it can be grounded in observed fact.

For Strevens, this methodological restriction is what gave science its unparalleled explanatory power. Unlike earlier forms of “natural philosophy,” modern science is not grounded in metaphysics, rhetoric, or philosophical reflection. Its distinctive success comes from its procedural consensus: everyone agrees on what counts as evidence and what methods are legitimate. In the game of science, the only winning move is empirical. That is what makes it cumulative, self-correcting, and remarkably successful at generating knowledge about the natural world.

But that same iron rule is precisely what philosophy lacks. Philosophers do not share a fixed set of methods, nor do they agree on what counts as legitimate evidence. They appeal to intuitions, counterexamples, conceptual distinctions, empirical studies, formal models, moral principles, and more, depending on the question and the school of thought. There is no shared foundation, no single procedure for adjudicating disputes. That is not necessarily a flaw. But it explains why genuinely philosophical questions do not migrate into the sciences: they do not meet the evidential criteria that would make them scientifically tractable.

As Strevens puts it, the natural philosophy of old failed to generate the kind of procedural consensus that now defines scientific inquiry. Philosophy did not become science by growing more refined. It had to be replaced. The scientific revolution succeeded not because it continued philosophical methods, but because it rejected them. Newton succeeded where Aristotle failed not by offering deeper metaphysical insights, but by replacing philosophical reasoning with empirical precision. This was not a continuation of philosophy—it was a break from it.

The Too Difficult Theory

A second explanation for philosophy’s lack of resolution is what I’ll call the Too Difficult Theory. Unlike the Spin-Off Theory, which holds that philosophical questions are eventually answered and passed off to the sciences, this view claims that some philosophical problems have answers, but we are incapable of grasping them. The obstacle is not the absence of evidence or method, but the limitations of the human mind.

Peter van Inwagen expresses a version of this view when he suggests that the persistent disagreement among philosophers may indicate that some of the “big questions” are unsolvable, at least by creatures like us. As he puts it,

If we are unable to provide satisfactory answers to questions like, ‘Why is there anything at all?’ and ‘Why should there be rational beings?’ and ‘How is the apparent motion of time related to reality?’… well, why should that astonish us? What reason have we, what reason could we possibly have, for thinking that our intellectual abilities are equal to the task of answering these questions?⁷

Colin McGinn also develops a version of this idea.⁸ He argues that certain aspects of consciousness are permanently beyond our understanding because of structural limits in the human mind. Likewise, Bertrand Russell suggests that many philosophical issues are simply “insoluble by the human intellect.” Just as a dog cannot learn calculus, there may be truths that we cannot grasp, no matter how hard we try.

The Too Difficult Theory allows philosophy to retain ownership overs its central questions, but it paints a somber picture of our epistemic condition. We are seekers in the dark, reaching for insights that, by our very nature, we are unequipped to grasp. Although this view leaves open the possibility that other kinds of minds (e.g., post-humans, superintelligent aliens, or artificial intelligences) might someday succeed where we have failed, it offers little comfort for us. It casts philosophy as a discipline of permanent frustration, driven by questions that forever outstrip our cognitive capacities.

This picture also raises a troubling question: if the Too Difficult Theory is correct, why do philosophy? If philosophical knowledge is fundamentally inaccessible to beings like us, then our efforts may seem futile, like trying to unlock a door for which we simply do not have the right key.

The Trouble with Language

What else might explain why philosophers are chronically unable to resolve their central questions?

Perhaps the difficulty lies not in the complexity of the world, but in the structure of the questions themselves—especially in the language we use to pose them. On this view, philosophical disagreement often stems not from a lack of evidence or deficient methods, but from ambiguity, conceptual instability, or subtle shifts in meaning that make shared understanding elusive. There are at least three ways to develop this idea, outlined below.

Conceptual Squishiness

One line of explanation focuses on the vagueness and instability of language. Nathan Ballantyne puts the point this way:

There is a kind of conceptual squishiness or mushiness in philosophical discourse, and this makes presenting philosophy hard in a different way than other fields happen to be hard. This is plausibly so because of the cognitive limitations of practitioners and the vagaries of language that philosophical arguments often involve. It isn’t that philosophical propositions are hard to grasp when presented with clarity – it is that they are not often presented with clarity.⁹

On this view, language is not a neutral medium for expressing philosophical ideas but a source of distortion and confusion. Even basic terms like “knowledge,” “freedom,” or “good” often shift under pressure, and much of philosophical debate turns on what seem like terminological or conceptual ambiguities. This point resonates with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”¹⁰ He suggests that philosophical problems arise not from the world itself, but from misunderstandings about language.

Verbal Disputes

A version of this idea is that many philosophical disputes are merely verbal. What appears to be deep disagreement is often just a matter of divergent linguistic usage. Philosophers may think they are debating substantive claims, when in fact they are talking past one another.

This idea has a long pedigree. In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume argues that disputes about liberty and necessity persisted only because of “ambiguous expressions” and led philosophers into “a labyrinth of obscure sophistry,” despite the fact that “they were always of the same opinion.” He writes:

From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long on foot, and remains still undecided, we may presume, that there is some ambiguity in the expression, and that the disputants affix different ideas to the terms employed in the controversy.¹¹

Contemporary philosophers have echoed this diagnosis. Ernest Sosa writes that he is “convinced that much disagreement on controversial issues, especially in philosophy, has [a] deeply verbal nature.”¹² In On What Matters, Derek Parfit claims that some major disputes in ethics are not genuine disagreements at all: “These people are climbing the same mountain on different sides.”¹³ And David Chalmers has developed a framework for identifying verbal disputes, arguing that when interlocutors agree on all the relevant facts but use key terms differently, the disagreement is verbal.¹⁴ Once the meanings are clarified, the appearance of conflict may dissolve.

This diagnosis can be illuminating, but it carries a deflationary implication. If many philosophical disagreements are merely verbal, then the primary task of philosophy is not to discover new truths about the world, but to clean up conceptual confusion. On this view, philosophy becomes a kind of conceptual janitor: resolving pseudo-problems, clarifying terms, and showing where our words have led us astray. Wittgenstein embraced this vision, claiming that the aim of philosophy is not to advance theses or settle debates, but to achieve clarity. As he put it, philosophy “leaves everything as it is.”

However, this view faces serious challenges. As Frank Dilley pointed out over fifty years ago, if philosophical disagreement were merely verbal, we should have seen much more convergence by now. “Some disagreements do disappear,” he writes, “but it is characteristic of basic philosophical disputes that they do not disappear even in the course of centuries of discussion.”¹⁵ If philosophers really agreed—if their supposed disagreements were simply the result of using different terminology—then we would expect those hidden agreements to become visible as conceptual translations were clarified and theoretical connections worked out. But this has not happened. The persistence of disagreement even after centuries of careful clarification suggests that something deeper is at stake.

Defective Questions

A different linguistic explanation is that many philosophical questions are defective in form. A question is defective when it cannot be answered in a truth-evaluable way using the terms in which it is asked. Some questions rest on faulty presuppositions—for instance, assuming that every category must have an essence, or that we can cleanly carve the world at its joints through conceptual analysis. Others may simply be confused, like asking “What time is it on the sun?” Still others appear to be well-formed but collapse under scrutiny. Some philosophers argue, for example, that the notion of a “bare particular” is incoherent, or that “agent causation” is not just false but unintelligible. What looks like a meaningful claim or question may, on reflection, fail to make sense.

For many logical positivists, the problem runs even deeper. On their view, some philosophical questions are not just confused or misleading; they are meaningless. A statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable or analytically true. Questions that meet neither standard, such as “Do universals exist?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, or “Is the Absolute infinite?”, are dismissed as pseudo-questions. These questions appear to ask something, but they fail to express a genuine proposition. Moritz Schlick, a central figure in logical positivism, put the point bluntly: “the fate of all ‘philosophical problems’ is this: some of them will disappear by being shown to be mistakes and misunderstandings of our language and the others will be found to be ordinary scientific questions in disguise.”¹⁶ For Schlick and his contemporaries, the persistence of philosophical puzzlement is a symptom not of deep problems but of deep confusion.

The idea that many philosophical questions are literally meaningless once held serious sway, especially among the logical positivists. But their view hasn’t aged well. Their core principle—that a statement is meaningful only if it’s empirically testable or analytically true—turned out to be far too strict. It ruled out not just metaphysics, but huge swaths of science, ethics, and even their own principle, which flunked its own test. As a result, the positivist program collapsed under the weight of its own criteria, and today, few philosophers take it seriously.

Value Conflict

Even when philosophers aren’t talking past each other or asking meaningless questions, disagreement may persist for a deeper reason. Despite its reputation for rigor, reason, and objectivity, philosophy is likely shaped by values and judgment.

In The Strife of Systems, Nicholas Rescher argues that philosophers are unable to agree because they prioritize different cognitive values. These are the traits we use to evaluate theories—for instance, coherence, plausibility, simplicity, explanatory power, scope, elegance. One might prefer a theory that preserves intuitions at the cost of complexity; another might favor simplicity even if it violates common sense. There is no algorithm for balancing these values, and no neutral procedure for determining which trade-offs are rationally preferable. This makes philosophical disagreement not only possible but, in many cases, rational. As Rescher writes, philosophers can “reasonably accept different values to different degrees,” and their theory choices will reflect these deeper evaluative commitments.

David Lewis makes a similar point:

But when all is said and done, and all the tricky arguments and distinctions and counterexamples have been discovered, presumably we will still face the question which prices are worth paying, which theories are on balance credible, which are the unacceptably counterintuitive consequences and which are the acceptably counterintuitive ones. On this question we may still differ. And if all is indeed said and done, there will be no hope of discovering still further arguments to settle our differences.¹⁷

In other words, philosophical disagreement often persists not because of poor reasoning, but because even good reasoning leads people in different directions, depending on what they care about.

Philosophers are also shaped by their social, political, religious, and methodological outlooks. These influences affect what they find plausible, which arguments they consider compelling, and what kinds of explanations they regard as legitimate. A philosopher with strong religious beliefs, for example, may resist any theory that undermines the coherence of the soul or the possibility of an afterlife, even if the theory is logically rigorous. Political values can also shape philosophical views. Someone committed to egalitarian ideals may be more receptive to theories that emphasize fairness or structural injustice, while a philosopher with libertarian leanings may prefer theories that prioritize individual rights and personal agency.

Methodological preferences often reflect deeper worldviews as well. Some philosophers are drawn to empiricism because they view science as the most reliable path to knowledge. Others favor rationalist or conceptual approaches, believing that reason alone can uncover fundamental truths. These preferences are often grounded in larger ideological, cultural, or personal frameworks. Even disagreements over the value and limits of philosophy itself—such as Russell’s rejection of the later Wittgenstein’s meta-philosophy—can be seen as expressions of competing visions of what philosophy is and what it should be.

Temperament

William James characterized the differences at issue as temperamental in character. In his classic essay on “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy” he wrote:

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other.¹⁸

James called temperament “the potentest of all our premises.” This idea was reinforced by F. C. S. Schiller, a pragmatist like James, who viewed philosophical commitments as shaped by personality and described them as the “legitimate offspring of an idiosyncrasy.” According to Schiller, philosophers engage in “inconclusive and unending warfare, precisely because neither side has hitherto penetrated to the psychological core of its opponents’ creed.”¹⁹

This link between temperament and philosophical judgment has been taken seriously by a wide range of thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, and Arthur Lovejoy. Contemporary empirical research has also begun to support this idea. Studies by Adam Feltz and Edward T. Cokely, among others, have shown that personality traits can predict certain philosophically relevant judgments.²⁰ For instance, people who are more open to experience are more likely to endorse moral objectivism. People who are more extroverted tend to have stronger libertarian intuitions about free will. These findings suggest that persistent disagreement in philosophy may be rooted as much in differences of personality as in differences of reasoning.

Still, it would be a mistake to treat temperament as the whole story. As Nicholas Rescher points out, this kind of psychologism overstates the role of innate disposition and underplays the influence of life experience.²¹ Our philosophical outlooks are shaped not just by who we are temperamentally, but by what we have lived through, learned, and valued. “Our philosophical value orientations are rather acquired than innate,” he writes. It is therefore an illusion to think that one could simply map philosophical positions onto psychological types. A great deal more is involved. That said, the central insight remains important: the roots of philosophical disagreement are often extratheoretical, grounded in divergent values, experiences, and interpretive frameworks. These are not just disagreements about logic or evidence, but about what matters to us.

Metalinguistic Negotiation

Some philosophers have drawn a broader lesson from this pattern. According to David Plunkett and Tim Sundell, philosophical disputes are best understood not as debates about descriptive truths but as metalinguistic negotiations—that is, as normative disagreements about how language ought to be used.²² On this view, when philosophers argue about justice, knowledge, causation, identity, or freedom, they are not uncovering facts about these notions but proposing ways of refining, structuring, or rethinking them to better serve our theoretical or practical purposes.

Unlike traditional verbal disputes, which often hinge on misunderstanding or equivocation and tend to dissolve once key terms are clarified, metalinguistic negotiations persist even after the parties recognize they are using words in different ways. This is because the disagreement is not about what the words mean in any pre-existing sense, but about how they should be used going forward. Far from being merely semantic, such disputes are deeply normative and pragmatic. They concern which conceptual frameworks best align with our values, explanatory goals, and social commitments.

This perspective sheds new light on why philosophical disagreements so often prove intractable. If philosophers are not merely reporting on facts but negotiating the terms through which we understand our world, then persistent disagreement may be a sign not of failure but of the normative depth of the inquiry. As Amie Thomasson has argued in a series of works, philosophy is not a factual discipline in the way the sciences are—it is inescapably normative.²³ Even in metaphysics, where debates seem to turn on abstract truths, the real work often involves determining how we ought to use concepts like object, identity, or existence.

Why Philosophy Still Matters

If philosophy’s central questions cannot be conclusively settled, then it is natural to wonder whether engaging with them is worth the effort. Why should we keep doing philosophy if it offers so little by way of definitive answers?

One tempting response is to say that the value of philosophy lies not in what it resolves, but in what it reveals. As Russell put it in The Problems of Philosophy, the discipline’s worth is not found in the answers it provides, but in its ability to unsettle our assumptions, broaden our perspectives, and cultivate a “sense of wonder.” Philosophy, he wrote, “enlarges our thoughts and frees them from the tyranny of custom.” This suggests that irresolvability is not a flaw to be overcome, but a feature to be embraced.

Elsewhere, I have suggested something similar. In work with James Nguyen, we propose that progress in philosophy should be understood not in terms of consensus or truth-tracking, but in terms of understanding. Philosophers contribute to understanding when they help us grasp the structure of a problem, clarify what is at stake, or illuminate the trade-offs between competing views—even if they do not resolve the disagreement. On this model, the value of philosophy lies in how it frames questions, explores possibilities, and reveals the intellectual terrain. What we gain is not closure, but orientation.

This understanding-based conception of progress complements the view that philosophy is an inherently normative enterprise. As Thomasson has argued, many philosophical disagreements are not about discovering hidden facts, but about negotiating conceptual frameworks that reflect and refine our values. When we debate the meaning of justice, freedom, or knowledge, we are not merely uncovering empirical truths; we are proposing and contesting the norms that shape how we think, speak, and reason. The intractability of these disputes reflects their normative character. But that does not make them pointless. On the contrary, their unsettledness invites us to participate in the ongoing task of shaping the concepts we live by.

Understanding and normativity are not in tension. In fact, they work together. Philosophy aims to help us understand not only the structure of difficult problems, but the normative assumptions embedded within them. It invites us to reflect on what we take for granted, and to ask whether our values are coherent, defensible, or in need of revision. Because our values are not fixed or immune to reason, they can be debated, refined, and sometimes changed. Even if we do not convince our opponents, we may clarify our own commitments, shift the views of those watching from the sidelines, or at the very least, illuminate the contours of disagreement.

This may be a disappointing picture for those hoping that philosophy will deliver final answers. But if we accept that some questions are too deep or complex to be definitively settled, then philosophy’s value lies elsewhere. It gives us a disciplined way of examining our beliefs, challenging our assumptions, and navigating disagreements that will not go away. Its function is not to end inquiry, but to keep it alive in a thoughtful and illuminating way. Far from undermining the importance of philosophy, its irresolvability reveals what is most distinctive about it: a commitment to thinking clearly and critically about the most foundational issues, even when no consensus is in sight.

1. Dietrich, 2011 “There Is No Progress in Philosophy”; Kornblith 2012 “Is Philosophical Knowledge Possible?”; Mironov, 2013 “On Progress in Philosophy”; Chalmers, 2015 “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?”; Shand 2017 “Philosophy Makes No Progress, So What’s the Point of It?”.

2. Stoljar 2017 Philosophical Progress. In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism; Cappelen 2017 “Disagreement in Philosophy: An Optimistic Perspective”.

3. Brake 2017 “Making Philosophical Progress”; Hannon and Nguyen 2022 “Understanding Philosophy”.

4. Russell [1912] 2001: 90 The Problems of Philosophy.

5. Chalmers 2015: 25 “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?”.

6. Chalmers 2015: 25 “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?”.

7. van Inwagen 2015: 289 Metaphysics.

8. McGinn 1993 Problems in Philosophy.

9. Ballantyne 2014: 535 “Knockdown Arguments”.

10. Wittgenstein 1953: §109 Philosophical Investigations.

11. Hume 1748: VIII.i Treatise of Human Nature.

12. Sosa 2010: 281 “The Epistemology of Disagreement”.

13. Parfit 2011: 19 On What Matters.

14. Chalmers 2015 “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?”.

15. Dilley 1969: 219 “Why Do Philosophers Disagree?”.

16. Schlick 1932, 19 “Positivism and Realism”.

17. Lewis 1983: x Philosophical Papers.

18. James 1977: 363 On Pragmatism.

19. Schiller 1933: 125-7 “Must Philosophers Disagree?”.

20. Feltz and Cokely 2012 “The Philosophical Personality Argument”.

21. Rescher 1985: 134 The Strife of Systems.

22. Plunkett and Sundell 2013 “Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms”.

23. Thomasson 2009 ‘“Answerable and Unanswerable Questions”; also 2015, 2017.