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Can you give any instances of any philosophical problems that have been 'nailed' so to speak by philosophy - that is, solved?

November 10, 2005

Response from Jay L. Garfield on November 10, 2005
Yes. The question of whether the argument from design can prove the existence of the Christian, or any other, deity. That problem was nailed by Hume, and has been re-nailed in any number of recent articles. It can't. That also shows that the fact that philosophers have nailed a problem does not convince everyone!
Response from Richard Heck on November 10, 2005
There are other examples, too, though some of them are more complex. Philosophers used to spend a lot of time trying to understand the difference between "Every student read some book" and "Some book was read by every student" and, more generally, why sentences like the latter logically imply sentences like the former, but not vice versa. (The former means only that no student failed to read a book, whereas the latter says that all students read the same book.) The broad outlines of a solution to that problem were presented by Gottlob Frege in 1879 with the introduction of modern logic. There remain different ways to sort out the details.

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