Will philosophy ever come to an "end"?

Question

People often talk about the "end" of physics, but what about an end of philosophy?

Let me explain. My philosophy professor said that philosophy is kind of the parent discipline of all fields of inquiry and when philosophers clarify and refine questions well enough, they are spun off into their own disciplines.

I find this statement to be quite insightful. Mathematics was created by the ancient philosophers. The natural philosophers clarified their method of investigation and created natural science. Later, philosophers created the social sciences.

In modern times, cognitive psychology and linguistics are speaking to a number of philosophical questions. Certainly questions of cosmology and the like have already been taken out of philosophical inquiry.

It would seem that future philosophers will be forced more and more to reconcile their theories with mankind's great body of knowledge from other fields. They will have to become experts in those fields. And a philosopher who is an expert in field "X" might not even be considered a philosopher but a practitioner of field "X."

Answer 1

I think that's a fair description of what is happening in analytic philosophy. I'm not so sure about continental philosophy. There are, it seems to me, roughly two varieties of philosophical thought:

1. Concept clarification
2. Concept creation

The first variety is certainly forced to eventually, as you out put it, 'reconcile [its] theories with mankind's great body of knowledge from other fields.' If a concept has been adequately clarified, then it is no longer up to philosophers to tinker with it. Consider for example how Newton's insights eventually led to the dissolution of so-called 'natural philosophy', i.e. of the idea that philosophers ought to come up with (philosophical) theories explaining the motion of heavenly bodies and so forth. Or, similarly, how after medicine began to establish how our anatomical features explain our movement and activity it was no longer up to philosopher's to explain the locomotion of corpora. I think it is fair to say that philosophers of physics these days are pretty much on a par with physicists as far as theoretical knowledge is concerned - it is impossible to cogently engage with e.g. Quantum Field Theory literature if you're not fully immersed in the formalism that surrounds it (cf. Hans Halvorson.) And that definitely confirms your intuition that a philosopher of X can only be a practitioner of X. Crucially though, that doesn't mean that this will be possible for all X. And this leads us to (2).

On the other hand, therefore, the concept-creation side of philosophy (i.e. (2)) seems to be unaffected by any possible advance in empirical disciplines. Unless humans attain a kind of omniscience about the universe that would on all counts stretch the limits of plausibility, there will always be space for the creation of new concepts to conceptualize our current state of knowledge. And that, being as it is inherently philosophical in flavour, cannot, it seems to me, ever come to an end. In short: even if you think that you have uncovered all possible true sentences relative to a certain (fixed) vocabulary, that doesn't mean you won't be able to invent new vocabularies - thereby allowing yourself to say new things. This kind of philosophy, I think it is fair to say, will never end. And since philosophy is partly this kind of conceptual creation, it is also fair to say that philosophy itself will never end.

Answer 2

Redundant concepts and infinitely recursive sentences aside, I think that since the universe is finite (even if it is expanding, it is still finite at any given moment), there is a limit to the knowledge that could be held within it. Thus, in theory philosophy might come to an end. But we are so far from this, and have so little understanding about the universe, that any predictions either way are laughable. There's no way you could formulate any sort of logical argument that strongly supports an answer to your question either way; we just don't know enough yet.

Answer 3

Philosophy may breed other knowledge fields and these restrict fields may come to a point in which they are completely explored. But philosophy is much more than that. Basic philosophical questions like: what is knowledge? What does it mean to say "I know" something? If someone said "Everything that is there to be known is already known", one could ask "How can you know that? If there is something we don't know, how can we know it?". And so on...

Maybe this is what philosophy is about: not coming to an end.