Topics Philosophy

Question Chemists used to wonder why gasses tend to react with each other in small number ratios. But after the discovery of atoms, chemists have moved on to other questions. Are there any "dead questions" in philosophy? Are there any questions that were once up in the air, but are now moot or resolved?

Accepted:
March 23, 2011

Comments

"The only way we can ever get rid of philosophy," the great philosopher J. L. Austin wrote in "Ifs and Cans," is "by kicking it upstairs." In 'kicking a philosophical question upstairs'--which Austin takes to be an improvement on treating the question philosophically--a putatively philosophical question is revealed to belong to another branch of knowledge. There are numerous examples. Although there was considerable speculation in ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy about the nature of the physical elements, that issue is no longer debated; similarly, although there were debates about embryology from antiquity through the modern period, the way the fetus is formed is no longer a topic of philosophical discussion. In these cases, however, empirical questions have been split off from more properly philosophical, or conceptual issues--and there are, of course, philosophical issues that arise in connection with cosmology and embryology. I myself am inclined never to pronounce a philosophical question dead, for I think it's part of the very nature of philosophical questions that even questions or approaches to questions that seem dead and buried have a permanent possibility of rising again.