I have been hoping, and am still hoping, that others might chime in here, because I'm really curious to see everyone else post their own personal favourites. But here are a couple of mine. Hmm... am I required to think of sporting analogies? Sport is really not my forte. But I do remember a certain goal that a young David Beckham once scored for Manchester United, back in the mid-90s, with a single kick from behind the halfway line. I'd equate that with Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper, 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?'. Ever since Plato's Theaetetus , those who had wondered about such things at all had been largely satisfied that the answer was yes. (Ironically, Plato's own answer was no: but, as in many of his dialogues, he never offered a definitive solution at all, and the closest that we actually got to an analysis of the concept of knowledge was given along precisely these lines). No one ever seriously believed that truth, or belief, or justification for such belief, would be enough to...

Before I tackle your question head on, let me begin with an analogy: science. The number of philosophers who specialise in science is very small indeed. I'm not going to say that such people are non-existent: but, off-hand, I can't think of any. There are, however, quite a lot of philosophers who specialise in the philosophy of science. They ask very different questions from the scientists themselves, and they seek to answer them in very different ways. A scientist will seek to discover certain laws of nature that could explain how, as it might be, electrons cause certain observable effects to arise under certain conditions. But a philosopher of science will seek to analyse the very concept of a law of nature as such, or the nature of causation itself, or to describe what it actually means to explain something. Indeed, a philosopher of science might even question whether any amount of empirical data could ever justify us in regarding a scientist's claims about electrons as being literally true at...

First of all, let's distinguish two issues that seem to be interwoven in your question: what do/should historians of philosophy study, and what do/should actual working philosophers study? Taking the latter first, it is very true that Western philosophers tend to give little or no thought to folks like Nagarjuna. But there's nothing remarkable about that: they tend to give little or no thought to Plotinus either, or to Eriugena, or even to Descartes. Most working philosophers, although they might occasionally enjoy showing off a certain erudite awareness of the historical origins of their current debates, will rarely actually read and engage with works that are more than twenty years old. I suppose the idea is that newer works will preserve all that was good about earlier attempts at solutions to the problems in question, while also ironing out their flaws and generally pushing things forward. Giving "a more thorough exploration of the idea", as you put it. And maybe it would be a little naive to push...

Poetry can certainly be used to express profound ideas and attitudes concerning (for want of a better expression) 'the human condition'. These ideas can affect the reader's soul in a powerful way, helped along by the captivating power of the medium itself. And examples of poetry that might be regarded as 'philosophical' in this sense are innumerable. Indeed, one might make a case for claiming that it's the norm rather than the exception, and that this is the primary aspiration of most of the greatest poetry in history, from Homer to Dante to Sylvia Plath. But does this really count as philosophy? For some people, this is precisely what the best and most important kind of philosophy consists in. For others, however, and particularly within English-speaking academia, philosophy is more a matter of highly technical and abstract theories about the structure of reality, the nature of cognition, and things of that sort. And yet, as it turns out, those kinds of theories have been explored in verse...

We need to distinguish between a posteriori and a priori arguments. Empirical sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology are predominantly supported by a posteriori evidence, grounded in experience. By contrast, the 'exact sciences' like mathematics are predominantly supported by a priori demonstration, grounded in the pure intuitions of the intellect alone. Mathematics cannot be based on experience, it might be said, because experience can only ever reveal contingent truths, whereas mathematical speculation gives us an insight into necessity. But both a priori and a posteriori knowledge can jointly be distinguished from faith, which for present purposes we might as well just define as any other basis for belief that cannot be fitted into either of these categories (e.g. the authority of a respected individual or of a text regarded as sacred, or a private inspiration supposedly delivered only to the elect). Now, there have been many philosophers and theologians over the...

I think the standards of scholarship have improved over the last twenty years (or maybe the last forty or so -- it's been a gradual development). At least in the better work that is being done in the history of philosophy nowadays, there is a far higher level of rigour than one used to find. This has probably been a consequence of the expansion in the professional field during that period. With so many more academics working on these things than there used to be, all in (friendly) competition with one another, the somewhat woolly and slapdash approach that one can find in older works on the history of philosophy will nowadays lose out in the battle for publication. And the field has definitely benefitted as a result of this new rigour. But that's not necessarily to say that we understand historical philosophers better than they used to be understood. In the academic profession, there's a lot of pressure to come up with some new insight or original interpretation, to validate the publication of...