Disputed Statements

Nagarjuna, Philosophers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 150

Scholarly estimates for Nagarjuna's life vary, roughly the second to third century CE; no precise date is established.

Nagarjuna, Philosophers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States 250

See the birth-year note.

Philosophy of Biology, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Units of selection: whether natural selection acts primarily on genes, as Richard Dawkins's selfish gene view holds, on individual organisms, or on groups, a dispute over which level biological explanation of adaptation is properly pitched at.

Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene popularized gene selectionism against a longer tradition of organism level and, more recently, revived group level explanations of natural selection.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Philosophy of Education, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Whether education should be primarily child centered, following the learner's own developing interests as John Dewey and progressive educators urged, or content centered, transmitting a structured body of shared knowledge as E.D. Hirsch and cultural-literacy advocates urge.

John Dewey's progressive education and E.D. Hirsch's cultural-literacy movement remain the two poles education policy debates keep returning to.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Philosophy of History, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Whether history exhibits any overall pattern or direction: philosophers of history from Hegel and Marx to Fukuyama have proposed universal historical patterns, while critics from Karl Popper onward hold that no law-governed pattern of historical development can be established and that such historicism mistakes a narrative for a law.

Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism named and attacked the very idea of a law-governed pattern of history that Hegel, Marx and later Fukuyama each proposed in different forms.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Philosophy of Language, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Descriptivism versus the causal-historical theory of reference: whether a proper name refers by way of a description the speaker associates with it, as Frege and Russell held, or by a causal chain of use running back to an original act of naming, as Saul Kripke argued in Naming and Necessity.

Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1970 lectures, published 1980) is widely credited with overturning the descriptivist consensus, though descriptivists have since offered revised versions of their view.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Philosophy of Law, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Whether there is a moral duty to obey an unjust law: legal positivists such as H.L.A. Hart separate a law's validity from its morality and treat obedience as a further question, while natural law theorists hold that a sufficiently unjust rule fails to bind in conscience at all.

Debates over civil disobedience, from Thoreau through the twentieth century civil rights movement, kept this question live outside the seminar room as well as inside it.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Philosophy of Mathematics, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Whether a proof by exhaustive computer calculation, as in Appel and Haken's 1976 proof of the four color theorem, counts as genuine mathematical proof given that no human being can survey it, or marks a break from the traditional requirement that a proof be humanly checkable.

Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken's 1976 proof of the four color theorem, verified by computer case-checking no mathematician could survey by hand, forced this question onto philosophers of mathematics.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Philosophy of Mind, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Substance dualism against physicalism: Descartes held that mind and body are two distinct substances that causally interact, while contemporary physicalists hold that mental states are identical to, or wholly realized by, physical states of the brain, with property dualists and panpsychists defending positions in between.

The mind-body problem: whether the mind is identical with, or wholly produced by, the physical brain, or is something genuinely non-physical that interacts with it. Substance dualists, following Descartes, hold that mind and matter are two distinct kinds of thing; physicalists hold that every mental fact is, at bottom, a physical fact about the brain; property dualists and panpsychists occupy positions in between. No side has closed the case.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Philosophy of Religion, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States The problem of evil: whether the existence of gratuitous suffering counts as evidence against an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God, and whether any theodicy, the free will defense, soul-making, or skeptical theism, adequately answers it.

J.L. Mackie framed the logical problem of evil as a proof of atheism; Alvin Plantinga's free will defense is generally credited with blocking the logical version, leaving the evidential version, pressed by William Rowe, contested.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Philosophy of Science, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Scientific realism versus anti-realism: whether well-confirmed theories are approximately true descriptions of an unobservable world, as realists hold, or are useful instruments for prediction whose unobservable posits need not be believed, as instrumentalists and constructive empiricists such as Bas van Fraassen hold.

Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism gave anti-realism its most influential modern statement against a realist consensus among working scientists.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Philosophy of Technology, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Whether technology is autonomous, developing by an internal logic no human choice can redirect, as Jacques Ellul argued, or remains genuinely steerable by social and political choices, as social-construction-of-technology theorists hold.

Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society argued technique follows its own autonomous logic; social-construction-of-technology theorists such as Wiebe Bijker replied that the bicycle and other artifacts show real social steering at every stage of design.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Plato, Philosophers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States -428

Ancient sources place Plato's birth in either 429 or 428/427 BCE; no birth record survives and the figure is reconstructed from later biographical testimony, chiefly Diogenes Laertius, writing centuries afterward.

Source The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy tier 1

Plotinus, Philosophers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 204

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives 204 or 205 CE; ancient sources do not agree on the exact year.

Source Plotinus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) tier 1

Political Philosophy, Branches of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Debate

Currently States Liberty versus equality: whether a just society must give priority to individual liberty against redistribution, as libertarians such as Robert Nozick argue, or whether liberty is only meaningful alongside a fair distribution of resources, as egalitarians such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin argue.

Robert Nozick's libertarian reply to John Rawls kept this dispute alive as the central fault line in twentieth and twenty first century political philosophy.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Porphyry, Philosophers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 234

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives 234? to 305? CE; both dates are uncertain.

Source Porphyry (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) tier 1

Porphyry, Philosophers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States 305

Uncertain; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy marks both his birth and death years with a question mark.

Source Porphyry (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) tier 1

Pyrrho of Elis, Philosophers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States -360

Ancient chronology for Pyrrho is approximate; c. 365 to c. 360 BCE are both cited in modern scholarship.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Pyrrho of Elis, Philosophers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States -270

c. 275 to c. 270 BCE are both cited.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tier 1

Pyrrhonism, Schools of Philosophy

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 210

Sextus Empiricus, writing in the late second or early third century CE, is the last major Pyrrhonist whose work survives, but later writers report individual Pyrrhonists as late as the sixth century CE, so there is no settled date for when the school itself ceased.

Source Pyrrhonism (Wikipedia) tier 2