In the December 9, 2007, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote a breezy piece about what he (or his editors) dubbed “The New New Philosophy”: experimental philosophy, more jauntily known as X-Phi. Appiah wrote that “a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments.”
Brian Leiter salutes X-Phi’s latest big-media moment [memo to the NYT: Slate wrote about X-Phi last year], and the folks over at the Experimental Philosophy blog are understandably tickled by the publicity. But a philosopher from the University of North Texas wants people to know about about “a parallel movement”: field philosophy, which “emphasizes the importance of entering into settings where philosophic claims are tested by real-world challenges, where philosophers work in real time on a project basis with scientists, engineers, and policy makers.”
Vaughan Bell over at Mind Hacks brings a scientific-historical perspective to the discussion: “In a way, everything has come full circle. Before the word was invented, ‘science’ was called ‘natural philosophy,’ because it was the philosophy of how the natural world worked. It was distinguished from the rest of philosophy because it used experiments.”
One of Vaughan’s commenters casts a skeptical eye on the X-Phi phenom: “Some of its practitioners are more versed in neurophysiology than in philosophy, or have come to believe that empirical questions can directly replace some traditional philosophical ones. It’s not at all clear that they can, but the gloss of scientific methodology may make us more likely to accept their conclusions anyway.”
Last month, Benoit Hardy-Vallee, a postdoc fellow in philosophy at the University of Toronto, flagged a forthcoming book-length intro to the subject: Experimental Philosophy, edited by the X-Phi pioneer Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols. It’s due out from Oxford University Press in May 2008.
