Introducing Experimental Philosophy

It may seem a bit odd that a magazine like Psychology Today is sponsoring a blog by a band of philosophers. After all, isn't philosophy supposed to be something entirely separate from psychology? Aren't philosophers just supposed to sit in their armchairs pondering the great imponderables, while psychologists busy themselves delving into the actual facts of human thought and behavior?

Well, yes and no. It is true that many philosophers regard questions about how people actually think and feel as completely irrelevant to their discipline, but there has always been a strain within philosophy that concerns itself with questions about what people are actually like. Philosophers who work within this strain suppose that an important aspect of going after the big questions -- questions about morality, free will, consciousness, and so forth -- is to think deeply about the facts of human psychology.

In recent years, certain philosophers have sought to take this approach as far as it could go. Thus arose the movement usually called experimental philosophy. Philosophers working within this movement abandon their armchairs to actually go out and conduct systematic experiments. (For more on experimental philosophy, see the articles in the New York Times and Slate.)

In the months to come, we'll be blogging about some of the new research that has come out of this approach and, more generally, about how experimental studies can shed light on the age-old problems of philosophy. In the meantime, we'll leave you with something less intellectually demanding -- the experimental philosophy music video.