Philosophers' Thinking (Experimental philosophy & Qualitative Tools Vol 4)
Oxford: Academic Publishers (
2017)
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Abstract
EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY (VOLUME 4)
and Qualitative tools and experimental philosophy.
So-called Experimental Philosophy (X-Phi) is one of the latest fashions or fads in philosophy. It gives people who wish to do ‘philosophy’ but do not find something in the other types of doing philosophy something to do. The other types are, apart from a handful of original- and creative thinking individuals, the usual academic publications, theses, conferences, etc that keep professional philosophers busy and enable them to maintain their obligatory lists of publications, dealing with minute ‘analysis’ of aspects of other microscopic ‘analysis’.
Much of so-called Experimental Philosophy appears to me like some kind of rather superficial social surveys and drawing, mostly philosophically irrelevant conclusions from them. I present a number of sources on this kind of doing of ‘philosophy’.
As I myself was trained as a scientist and for years did work as scientific researcher I find much of what is passed off as so-called experimental philosophy very amateurish, not-methodological, lacking scientific research methods and naïve. I intended to add a second section to this volume, entitled scientific method, but the volume will already be too large without it.
I include different definitions of this sub-domain of philosophy, criticism of it and its methods and reasons for the practising of it. I conclude with a number of studies on the philosophy of sex and two articles of my own on the feeling accompanying male ejaculation and male orgasm.
I end with a Brian Leiter post/s and very interesting comments by a number of philosophers. THAT says more about philosophy/izing and the state and nature of this discipline than many so-called X-Phi ‘experiments’.