2013/04/01 by Luciano Floridi
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Philosophy and History of Science #Philosophy and Theoretical Science
paper · doi:10.1111/meta.12035
openalex publication_date 2013/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Abstract There are many ways of understanding the nature of philosophical questions. One may consider their morphology, semantics, relevance, or scope. This article introduces a different approach, based on the kind of informational resources required to answer them. The result is a definition of philosophical questions as questions whose answers are in principle open to informed, rational, and honest disagreement, ultimate but not absolute, closed under further questioning, possibly constrained by empirical and logico‐mathematical resources, but requiring noetic resources to be answered. The article concludes with a discussion of some of the consequences of this definition for a conception of philosophy as the study (or “science”) of open questions, which uses conceptual design to analyse and answer them.