Open Questions

Open Epistemology

Why It Is Open Edmund Gettier's 1963 counterexamples showed that justified true belief, the classical tripartite analysis inherited from Plato's Theaetetus, is not sufficient for knowledge: there are cases of justified true belief that still fall short of knowing. Epistemologists have proposed many candidate fourth conditions since, but the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's own survey concludes that despite considerable attention, particularly in the late twentieth century, no analysis has been widely accepted.

What Would Settle It A precise, counterexample-resistant fourth condition, or a replacement analysis of knowledge altogether, that a broad consensus of epistemologists converges on rather than one that continues to generate further counterexamples.

Expertise Needed Epistemology

Question posed in The Analysis of Knowledge (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Section 7, Is Knowledge Analyzable?.

Open Philosophy of Mind

Why It Is Open The hard problem of consciousness asks for an intelligible account that lets us see, in an intuitively satisfying way, how phenomenal, what it's like, consciousness could arise from physical or neural processes in the brain. Current theories cannot supply that link, a gap philosophers following Joseph Levine call the explanatory gap, and it remains genuinely contested whether the gap reflects a permanent limit on physical explanation or merely present theoretical shortcomings.

What Would Settle It An account that closes the explanatory gap between physical or neural processes and subjective experience, or a widely accepted argument establishing that no such physical account is possible even in principle.

Expertise Needed Philosophy of Mind

Question posed in Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Section 5.4, Prospects of explanatory success.

Open Philosophy of Mind

Why It Is Open Substance dualists, physicalists, property dualists and panpsychists each explain the correlation between mental states and brain states without producing an argument that has persuaded the others; the debate has run since Descartes with no side conceding.

What Would Settle It A physical explanation that closes the explanatory gap between third-person brain description and first-person experience, or a rigorous non-physicalist theory that makes testable predictions, would settle it; neither has yet been produced.

Expertise Needed Philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Dualism.

Open Metaphysics

Why It Is Open Libertarians, hard determinists and compatibilists disagree not only on the answer but on what freedom would have to mean for the question to be answerable at all, so the dispute has not converged even as physics and neuroscience have advanced.

What Would Settle It A settled account of whether the laws of physics are genuinely deterministic at the level that matters for choice, combined with an agreed definition of the freedom moral responsibility requires, would resolve it; neither is settled.

Expertise Needed Metaphysics, philosophy of action, physics

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Free Will.

Open Epistemology

Why It Is Open Since Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper, proposed fourth conditions (a no-false-lemmas clause, causal theories, reliabilism, safety and sensitivity conditions, virtue epistemology) have each met their own counterexamples, and no replacement analysis commands consensus.

What Would Settle It An analysis of knowledge that survives every known Gettier-style case without ruling out clear cases of ordinary knowledge would resolve it; some epistemologists instead argue the project of analyzing knowledge into more basic conditions should be abandoned.

Expertise Needed Epistemology

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. The Analysis of Knowledge.

Open Epistemology

Why It Is Open Internalists argue that a justification a thinker cannot access from the inside cannot be doing any justifying work for that thinker; externalists reply that small children and animals plainly have justified perceptual beliefs despite being unable to reflect on their own reliability. Neither side has produced a case the other accepts as decisive.

What Would Settle It A shared account of what justification is FOR, whether it is about the thinker's own responsible believing or about tracking truth, would settle which condition is required; the two camps currently start from different accounts of that point.

Expertise Needed Epistemology

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Internalist vs. Externalist Conceptions of Epistemic Justification.

Open Continental Philosophy

Why It Is Open Continental philosophy is a retrospective, primarily Anglo-American label rather than a self-description used by any of the thinkers it groups together, so there is no founding text, school or manifesto scholars point to as its starting point the way historians point to Husserl's Logical Investigations for phenomenology or Frege's Begriffsschrift for analytic philosophy.

What Would Settle It A settled historiographic consensus on whether the category names a real shared tradition with an identifiable origin or only a boundary drawn retrospectively from the analytic side of a later disciplinary split; historians of philosophy, not philosophers working within either tradition, would have to establish it.

Expertise Needed History of philosophy / philosophical historiography

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry: Analytic Philosophy.

Open Kyoto School

Why It Is Open The Kyoto School's own reference literature treats it as an ongoing intellectual tradition rather than a closed historical episode: founder Nishida Kitaro died in 1945, the year of Japan's surrender, yet later thinkers such as Keiji Nishitani continued the school's project for decades afterward, so encyclopedic treatments decline to name a single end date.

What Would Settle It Scholarly consensus on whether the school's identity is tied to a specific institutional marker, such as Nishida Kitaro's death in 1945, the same year Japan surrendered, or extends through the later generations, Nishitani and Tanabe's students among them, who continued the school's project for decades afterward under the same name.

Expertise Needed Intellectual history of modern Japan, history of philosophy

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry: The Kyoto School, Section 4.5 heading.

Open Mozi

Why It Is Open The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's own entry on Mohism states plainly that little is known of Mozi's life, not even which state he was from; only a rough floruit of circa 430 BCE, contemporaneous with Socrates, can be given with any confidence.

What Would Settle It Further archaeological or textual discovery bearing on Mozi's home state and exact birth and death years; the surviving record only supports a floruit of roughly 430 BCE.

Expertise Needed Early Chinese intellectual history, classical Chinese textual studies

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry: Mohism, Section 1.

Open The Book of Lord Shang

Why It Is Open The text as it survives shows layered composition, differing terminology and doctrine across chapters, and references to events after the death of Shang Yang in 338 BCE, so it cannot be a single work set down by his own hand even if some chapters preserve genuine early material.

What Would Settle It A securely dated early manuscript or a chapter-by-chapter philological study establishing which sections predate later Legalist compilers would let scholars separate any genuine Shang Yang material from later additions.

Expertise Needed Classical Chinese philology and textual history

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Open Laozi

Why It Is Open The Tao Te Ching's own textual history is genuinely contested: some accept the traditional account of a single sixth century BCE author who served at the Zhou court, while most modern textual scholarship reads the work as a compilation of aphorisms and verses assembled from multiple hands over generations, closer to a fourth century BCE finished form. No biographical source for Laozi predates the legendary accounts collected centuries after his supposed lifetime.

What Would Settle It New early manuscript evidence bearing directly on authorship and date of composition, of the kind the Guodian and Mawangdui bamboo and silk manuscript discoveries have already partially supplied for the text's transmission history, though not yet for the question of a single author.

Expertise Needed Sinology, paleography, textual criticism

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Laozi.

Open Cynicism

Why It Is Open Unlike Plato's Academy or Zeno's Stoa, Cynicism is not attested as a formally organized school with one identifiable founder, founding place or fixed set of doctrines; ancient sources give rival, uncertain traditions crediting Antisthenes, Diogenes of Sinope, or both, and it is not even certain the two men ever met.

What Would Settle It A firmer body of contemporary ancient testimony fixing a specific founding teacher, place and date, which the surviving sources do not provide and later doxography likely cannot supply.

Expertise Needed History of ancient philosophy

Question posed in Cynicism (Encyclopedia of Philosophy via Encyclopedia.com).

Open Pyrrhonism

Why It Is Open Critics ancient and modern have charged that suspending judgment on all matters makes purposeful action impossible; Sextus Empiricus answered that skeptics act by following appearances, but scholars remain divided on whether that answer itself smuggles in belief, and interpretation of Sextus's own position is, in the Stanford Encyclopedia's own words, quite controversial.

What Would Settle It A consensus reading of Sextus Empiricus's account of following appearances that scholars agree either does or does not amount to holding beliefs, which decades of interpretive work have not settled.

Expertise Needed Epistemology

Question posed in Ancient Skepticism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).