After looking at the list of categories found on the left hand side of this site a question came to me. What subject if any has been either vaguely or not at all covered in the field of philosophy? Is there any possibility for a breakthrough in some uncovered field that doesn't follow from some previous philosopher's argument or have all subjects relevant to philosophy been already covered? If there is no such subject, or it is just too abstract to consider what has not been considered, could you please point out some of the Cutting Edge or "hot topics" that are currently setting the philosophy world ablaze. Thank you for any consideration.

In reading various relatively contemporary secondary literature on several different philosophers, I've noticed that many of them seem to intimate (or sometimes outright state) that the philosopher in question has been badly misunderstood, at least from a time shortly after their death, until relatively recently. Has the standards of scholarship really drastically improved in the last 20 or so years, or is this sort of claim perennial to the secondary literature on philosophy?

When I was doing maths at university, I very often found that I couldn't quite prove something I had to. Being very sneaky, I would then do a bit of proof, write a little bit of incomprehensible gibberish, and then write the last couple of lines assuredly saying that the problem was solved. I get a little bit worried that proper philosophers might do a similar thing. In particular, the approach on this site very often seems to be to check that an argument about, say, morality matches our preconceived ideas. So I guess my question is how much can I believe what a philosopher says when I don't understand part of their argument? PS - my sneaky exam technique didn't work very well :(

I am curious: What are some questions of the philosophers? Alexander George, Noga Arikha, Amy Kind, Thomas Pogge, etc., we see your names, but we do not know your own inquiries. It would be novel to read and ponder the questions of those brave enough to answer our questions. And might one also learn by extrapolation, by thinking about a question new to them?--that is, the site can remain educational by shedding new light on a dim part of philosophy: the branch of asking questions. I would like to see a list of questions posed by the panelists.

Can you explain to me what is considered to be a "philosophical error"? How different is it from any other error in the common/simple world? And what are the bases under which something is considered as 'philosophical' error, as oposed to a 'regular/normal' error?

Can and should we see philosophy as art? LCM

Is the translation of philosophical texts from one language to another a cause of problems? Can one really know unless one is bilingual except by being told by others who are? I found Heiddeger and Sartre very difficult in translation - is it me or them or the translation that is the problem? (Jokes welcome!) Also, what about philosophers who wrote in now dead languages like Plato, etc? Nuances and tone must be lost, even to classical scholars. At best do you get a rendering, or does this apply more to classical literature than philosophy? New translations of Homer are popping up all the time. Is the same true of Aristotle, for example, and can we ever say there are definitive texts by him in English?

There's an article in The New Yorker this week (Feb. 12) about two philosophers-turned-scientists who, in the course of their studies, developed a strong distaste for the philosophical way of things (one of them bashes Thomas Nagel's bat thought-experiment as an incompetent way to approach the mind-body problem). Is it true, as the article asserts, that philosophy is continually ceding its territory to the sciences (philosophy of the mind may be rendered obsolete by neuroscience), so that less and less is left to philosophers over time? Could science make philosophy obsolete?

Why is it that even a three-year-old child knows the answer to some major philosophical questions while philosophers sometimes spend their whole lives searching for an answer?

Why is it that there is often so much discussion in regard to what a particular philosopher meant to say (as opposed to the strength of his argument)? It seems unsurprising and yet kind of strange that we could be so unclear as to what philosophers' arguments are. People seem to find ample disagreement in their interpretation of even such philosophers as Hume who are widely regarded as extremely capable writers. I don't get it! This is not literature or fiction -- presumably most philosophers aren't interested in sowing ambiguity or couching their arguments in metaphors, so why the confusion?