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Science Connections

Philosophy, Science, And Everything In Between

Massimo Pigliucci at the 2006 Philosophy of Science meeting in Vancouver.

Can philosophers do experiments? Should they? This was one of the burning questions at the 2006 Philosophy of Science Association meeting in beautiful (if rainy) Vancouver, where one of the hot topics was the superficially strange idea that one can do ‘experimental philosophy’. As Jonathan Weinberg and Stephen Crowley of Indiana University stressed during their talk, “This isn’t an oxymoron.” Perhaps not, but the idea that philosophers, the quintessential ‘armchair thinkers’ would get their hands dirty with actual data, sounds amusing to some and repellent to others.

Then again, we should remember that science itself originated as ‘natural philosophy’, with practitioners from Aristotle to Bacon, and Galileo to Newton. History notwithstanding, modern philosophy is broadly divided into ‘analytical’, which continues the tradition of the rationalists from Plato to Descartes and the empiricists from Aristotle to Hume, and ‘continental’ (because it originated in continental Europe), with its emphasis on cultural criticism and subjective phenomenology.

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