There are more options than “progresses in linear orderly fashion” and “totally arbitrary.” And if you read someone like Kuhn [1] you may question the progressi

There are more options than “progresses in linear orderly fashion” and “totally arbitrary.” And if you read someone like Kuhn [1] you may question the progressing narrative of science. I’d also be wary of separating scientific insights from philosophical/religious culture. Most famous scientists historically believed themselves to be looking for a divinely-organized system, and it’s unclear to me if they would have even looked in the first place without that underlying belief structure. You could go back even further and say all scientific inquiry basically rests on a conceptual distinction between Self and World, which is very much a trait of Monotheism. I think philosophical insights could roughly be described as a mix of human biological realities (which haven’t really changed, ever) interacting with historical and technological events - and progressing over time in response to those events. Kant, for example, is mostly talking about things that are essentially fundamental to the human experience, even if he was in dialogue with the ideas that were popular in his time. People have argued against Kant, but I don’t think we can really “surpass” the kind of problem he’s investigating in the way you might think we have surpassed an outdated theory of physics. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...