  A survey of the philosophical career of innateness reveals that although it is an easy doctrine to attack, it is a hard one to kill. Innateness has been in the philosophical limelight in two periods – each time flaring, and then receding. In the ancient world, it played a pivotal role in Plato’s philosophy, but was excluded from the Aristotelian system that came to dominate subsequent philosophical thinking. In the 17th and 18th century, it was revived. It played an important role in Descartes’ theory of knowledge, Locke mounted a sustained assault against it at the very beginning of his Essay, and Leibniz produced a detailed rebuttal against Locke. But the Lockean Empiricist approach carried the day, and innateness was written off as a backward and discredited view. Nineteenth century Kantianism, although potentially friendlier to innateness, left it on the sidelines as philosophically irrelevant. Recently, however, prompted by Noam Chomsky’s claims that findings in linguistics vindicate Nativism against Empiricism (see Chomsky 1965 for an early example), innateness has made a strong comeback; it is once again the subject of philosophical and scientific controversy.