Philosophy Atlas
Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.
80 statements.
Epistemology, Key DebateThe Gettier problem: Edmund Gettier's 1963 counterexamples showed that a belief can be justified and true purely by luck without amounting to knowledge, so justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge; the search for a fourth condition, or a wholly different analysis of knowledge, remains open more than sixty years later.
Epistemology, Branches of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Key Debate
Currently States The Gettier problem: Edmund Gettier's 1963 counterexamples showed that a belief can be justified and true purely by luck without amounting to knowledge, so justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge; the search for a fourth condition, or a wholly different analysis of knowledge, remains open more than sixty years later.
Edmund Gettier's 1963 three-page paper overturned a definition of knowledge many philosophers had treated as settled, and the search for a replacement has not converged.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Epistemology, Key DebateInternalism versus externalism about justification: internalists hold that what justifies a belief must be accessible from within the believer's own perspective, on reflection alone, while externalists such as reliabilists hold that a belief can be justified by standing in a reliable relation to the world, such as ordinary perception, that the believer need not be aware of at all.
Epistemology, Branches of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Key Debate
Currently States Internalism versus externalism about justification: internalists hold that what justifies a belief must be accessible from within the believer's own perspective, on reflection alone, while externalists such as reliabilists hold that a belief can be justified by standing in a reliable relation to the world, such as ordinary perception, that the believer need not be aware of at all.
Whether justification is a matter of the believer's own accessible reasons or can be conferred by a reliable process the believer need not be aware of divides epistemologists into internalist and externalist camps.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Ethics, Key DebateWhether morality is discovered or made: the Socratic tradition treats the good as an objective target reason can pursue through examined dialogue, while Nietzsche treats inherited morality as a historically contingent human invention, open to revaluation rather than discovery.
Ethics, Branches of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Key Debate
Currently States Whether morality is discovered or made: the Socratic tradition treats the good as an objective target reason can pursue through examined dialogue, while Nietzsche treats inherited morality as a historically contingent human invention, open to revaluation rather than discovery.
A third position denies both horns: J.L. Mackie's error theory holds that ordinary moral discourse commits speakers to objective values and objective prescriptions, but that no such objective moral facts exist at all, so moral claims are not so much discovered, made, or revalued as systematically false; see the attached dissent.
Source Moral Anti-Realism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Ethics, Key DebateConsequentialism versus deontology, sharpened by the trolley problem: whether the rightness of an action is fixed entirely by its consequences, as consequentialists hold, or by duties and rules that can forbid an act even when it produces the best outcome, as deontologists hold, with trolley cases used to test the two views against shared intuitions.
Ethics, Branches of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Key Debate
Currently States Consequentialism versus deontology, sharpened by the trolley problem: whether the rightness of an action is fixed entirely by its consequences, as consequentialists hold, or by duties and rules that can forbid an act even when it produces the best outcome, as deontologists hold, with trolley cases used to test the two views against shared intuitions.
The trolley problem and its variants have been used since Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson to sharpen, without settling, the older dispute between consequentialist and deontological ethics.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Existentialism, Start Year1943
Existentialism, Schools of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Start Year
Currently States 1943
Existentialism is usually dated to the 1940s, when Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) and Beauvoir's early work gave the movement its name and its clearest statement, but its philosophical roots are commonly traced to Kierkegaard in the 1840s, so no single start year commands full agreement.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
German Idealism, End Year1831
Jean Bodin, Birth Year1530
Jean Bodin, Philosophers
Standing
Concerns Birth Year
Currently States 1530
Sources give 1529 or 1530 for Bodin's birth in Angers; no birth record survives, and his identity is further complicated by other men named Jean Bodin active in the same period and region.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Kyoto School, Start Year1911
Kyoto School, Schools of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Start Year
Currently States 1911
1911 marks the publication of Nishida Kitaro's An Inquiry into the Good, which secured his position at Kyoto University and is usually treated as the school's founding work; there was no single formal founding date or charter.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Laozi, DescriptionA figure traditionally credited as the author of the Tao Te Ching and the founder of philosophical Daoism, said in later legend to have served as an archivist at the Zhou dynasty royal court, to have been an older contemporary of Confucius, and to have ridden west out of China on an ox in old age, pausing at a border pass only long enough to write down his teaching before disappearing. Whether a single historical author lies behind this legend is itself an open scholarly question distinct from the standing of the text: most modern scholars read the Tao Te Ching as a compilation of aphorisms and verses assembled from multiple hands over generations rather than composed at one sitting by one person, though the traditional name remains how the text and the tradition it founds are known.
Laozi, Philosophers
Standing
Concerns Description
Currently States A figure traditionally credited as the author of the Tao Te Ching and the founder of philosophical Daoism, said in later legend to have served as an archivist at the Zhou dynasty royal court, to have been an older contemporary of Confucius, and to have ridden west out of China on an ox in old age, pausing at a border pass only long enough to write down his teaching before disappearing. Whether a single historical author lies behind this legend is itself an open scholarly question distinct from the standing of the text: most modern scholars read the Tao Te Ching as a compilation of aphorisms and verses assembled from multiple hands over generations rather than composed at one sitting by one person, though the traditional name remains how the text and the tradition it founds are known.
See the open question recorded on this entity for the historicity debate.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Laozi, Birth Year-604
Laozi, Philosophers
Standing
Concerns Birth Year
Currently States -604
604 BCE is the traditional legendary date. Most modern textual scholarship doubts a single sixth century BCE author; see the open question recorded on this entity.
Legalism, End Year-206
Legalism, Schools of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns End Year
Currently States -206
Marks the fall of the Qin dynasty, whose collapse discredited Legalism as an explicit state ideology; scholars debate whether this counts as the end of the school or merely the end of its unmixed political dominance, since its legal and administrative machinery persisted inside later, nominally Confucian, dynasties.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
Logic, Key DebateLogical pluralism versus logical monism: whether classical logic is the single correct account of valid inference, or whether distinct logics, classical, intuitionistic, relevance and paraconsistent among them, can each be correct for different subject matters or purposes.
Logic, Branches of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Key Debate
Currently States Logical pluralism versus logical monism: whether classical logic is the single correct account of valid inference, or whether distinct logics, classical, intuitionistic, relevance and paraconsistent among them, can each be correct for different subject matters or purposes.
JC Beall and Greg Restall's defense of logical pluralism reopened a question earlier logicians treated as closed in favor of classical logic alone.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Madhva, Birth Year1238
Madhva, Death Year1317
Marcus Aurelius, Death PlaceOn the Danube frontier, at Vindobona (modern Vienna) or Sirmium; ancient accounts differ on the precise location.
Mencius, Birth Year-372
Mencius, Philosophers
Standing
Concerns Birth Year
Currently States -372
Ancient sources give no exact birth date; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy places Mencius only broadly in the fourth century BCE, a century after Confucius's death. 372 BCE is the commonly cited scholarly approximation; other reconstructions place his birth as late as 385 BCE.
Source Mencius (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Mencius, Death Year-289
Metaphysics, Key DebateWhat most fundamentally exists: a plurality of individual substances bearing properties, as Aristotle held; a single infinite substance under two attributes, as Spinoza argued; or whether the very category of a self-standing thing dissolves on inspection, as Nagarjuna's doctrine of emptiness and the Dao's own namelessness both suggest, from unrelated traditions arriving at a similar dissolution.
Metaphysics, Branches of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Key Debate
Currently States What most fundamentally exists: a plurality of individual substances bearing properties, as Aristotle held; a single infinite substance under two attributes, as Spinoza argued; or whether the very category of a self-standing thing dissolves on inspection, as Nagarjuna's doctrine of emptiness and the Dao's own namelessness both suggest, from unrelated traditions arriving at a similar dissolution.
Beyond disagreement over what exists, some twentieth-century philosophers rejected metaphysical inquiry's legitimacy altogether. The Vienna Circle logical positivists held that metaphysical statements, being neither analytic and a priori nor empirical and synthetic, fail their verification principle and are therefore cognitively meaningless rather than merely false; see the attached dissent.
Source Vienna Circle (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Metaphysics, Key DebateFree will versus determinism: libertarians defend genuine alternative possibilities incompatible with universal causal determination, hard determinists deny that any freedom worth wanting survives if determinism is true, and compatibilists hold that freedom and determinism are not in conflict once freedom is properly defined as acting on one's own desires and reasons.
Metaphysics, Branches of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Key Debate
Currently States Free will versus determinism: libertarians defend genuine alternative possibilities incompatible with universal causal determination, hard determinists deny that any freedom worth wanting survives if determinism is true, and compatibilists hold that freedom and determinism are not in conflict once freedom is properly defined as acting on one's own desires and reasons.
Whether human choices are ever free in a sense incompatible with universal causal determination remains unsettled among philosophers who otherwise agree on the physics.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Mohism, Common NameUniversal Love
Mohism, Schools of Philosophy
Standing
Concerns Common Name
Currently States Universal Love
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's own entry cautions this popular rendering of jian ai overstates the doctrine's emotional content: jian carries the sense of including everyone within a whole, and ai here typically refers to a dispassionate concern for welfare rather than passionate attachment, so the entry judges inclusive care the better translation.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy