I think in some areas, especially the one you are interested in, do progress. We have Descartes, a bunch of people responded to him, that got us to Hume, who ha

I think in some areas, especially the one you are interested in, do progress. We have Descartes, a bunch of people responded to him, that got us to Hume, who has a fairly modern outlook a scientist will resonate with. People like Kant tried to respond, not so well in my opinion. Enter the 1800s, we learn that Euclid's axioms are just that, not provable, that resonates through (some) philosophy, until we get to the early 1900s when people like Russell and Whitehead get pretty far into defining the limits of knowledge via their formidable knowledge of mathematics. At this same time the logical positivists were doing there thing, trying to establish exactly what we can know from observation and pure logic. Move ahead into the 50s or so and you have Quine, Kuhn, and Popper re-examining their work and establishing new ways of thinking about the topic. These days you have philosophers like Dennett who engage scientists to ensure he is starting from the best available evidence, and then philosophizes about what might be true. This is, IMO, valuable in that how else do you figure out research directions? That's overstated, usually the next question to try to answer is apparent based on our current understanding and experimental apparatus, but at the least Dennett is very entertaining to read. In any case, you don't have to read Descartes et al to have a modern, scientific understanding of knowledge, but all of this built from that foundation. Knowing some of the flawed reasoning that occurred along the way is vital to not repeat those same mistakes, in my experience. So, there you have it, a (extremely reductive with huge gaps) history from early 1600s to the present, of philosophers building on each other's work into an intellectual framework you probably hold. There are of course many other branches; I just followed one, briefly, to the present to a tip that is probably pretty close to the thinking that informs your coursework.