I took a lot of philosophy classes in college, and one of my professors often joked that "no one in the department can make any decisions!" That's because a lot of philosophy happens in an armchair. Well, not anymore! Our Next Big Thing series continues with Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher -- and TOTN fave -- who wrote about the next big think in philosophy -- it's called "x-phi," or "experimental philosophy," and it's ruffling some feathers.
Blog of the Nation
As an erstwhile philosophy student, I am very interested in recent experimental philosophy.
- I am curious what Dr. Appiah thinks of Jon Haidt's recent research on people's foundations for moral decisions.
- On the subject of fMRI, what are the philosophical implications of our brains' role in empathy?
X-Phi is often poor philosophy and almost always interprets results from very very bad experiments that have generated incomplete and wrongly analyzed data.
The X-Phi attitude is to be applauded. But a good dose of skepticism should accompany the blanket acceptance of X-Phier's interpretations of their "experimental" results.
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