EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY: NEW BRANCH IN PHILOSOPHY AND NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

Abstract

The article presents new branch of philosophy, namely the experimental philosophy that has powerfully raised in the last twenty five years and is presented in the West and Central Europe, and in the USA. The paper briefly describes the history of experimental philosophy, it’s mainframe thoughts, the key methods, the research topics and some results. The article demonstrates that experimental philosophy may be understood as an attempt to widen the list of methods available for philosophy, as an attempt to reform philosophy from inside. The paper presents main branches within experimental philosophy, namely (1) restrictivism, (2) experimental descriptivism and (3) experimental analysis. Within the last one, the experimental analysis, author follows Alexander and Weinberg (2014) and describes three levels of intuitions usage: intuitive solipsism, intuitive elitism, intuitive populism, but to these tree he adds the forth one – professional intuitivism. The general schema of an experimental philosophical study is presented and discussed. The article also describes some of the already well known key experimental studies like the experiment on the side effect by J. Knobe (Knobe-effect), experiment on moral judgment by J. Green. The article highlights a high interdisciplinary potential of experimental philosophy and describes the sub-fields of possible collaboration between philosophers, psychologists, behavioral economists, legal scholars, and other scientists that study human behavior. In many cases the studies on experimental philosophy tell us about the psychological processes that underlie the philosophically relevant intuitions. So, one may point to the bilateral interest of philosophers and psychologists in further development of experimental philosophy. The raise of experimental philosophy, which induces an active production of empirically proven knowledge, reflects the growing impact of philosophy on society, on setting and rethinking the norms of behavior, on formation of values and modulation of human behavior, especially when one considers the powerful modern mass-media.