Doing Philosophy with Thought Experiments: Why and How
Philosophers often use short, imaginary cases in their argumentation: thought experiments. The seminar examines this philosophical method through three central questions: What are thought experiments? What can we learn from them? And how can they be used for doing and teaching philosophy? To address these questions, we will study well-known thought experiments from epistemology, ethics, and physics, discuss competing accounts of how thought experiments work, and examine examples of how they can be used in teaching philosophy.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the seminar, students will be able to:
• demonstrate familiarity with the contemporary debate on thought experiments;
• situate these debates within broader philosophical contexts;
• compare the role of thought experiments across philosophy and the sciences;
• critically analyze and evaluate thought experiments in both oral and written form;
• demonstrate familiarity with the use of thought experiments as pedagogical tools for teaching philosophy.
Content:
The seminar will cover the following topics and questions:
• What is a thought experiment?
• Why should we care about thought experiments?
• Thought experiments in science and philosophy
• How and what can we learn from thought experiments?
• The problem of informativeness
• The Intuition account and its challenges (experimental philosophy)
• The argument view and its challenges
• The problem of deviant realizations
• How to use thought experiments?
• The heuristic function of thought experiments and alethic refuters
• Thought experiments as a pedagogical tool
• Philosophy for children
Selected Bibliography:
• Brown, James Robert. 1991. “Thought Experiments: A Platonic Account.” Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy, 119–28. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Deutsch, Max. 2015. The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, a Bradford Book.
• Gendler 1998 Galileo and the Indispensability of Scientific Thought Experiment
• Gettier, E. L. (1963). Is justified true belief knowledge? Analysis, 23(6),121–123.
https://doi.org/10.2307/3326922
• Knobe, Joshua and Shaun Nichols, "Experimental Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/experimental-philosophy/>.
• Norton, John D. 2004. “On Thought Experiments: Is There More to the Argument?” Philosophy of Science 71 (5): 1139–51.
https://doi.org/10.1086/425238.
• Sorensen, Roy A. 1992. Thought Experiments. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Stuart, Michael T. ; Fehige, Yiftach & Brown, James Robert (eds.) (2018). The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments. London: Routledge.
• Thomson, J. J. (1985). The trolley problem. The Yale Law Journal, 94(6),1395–1415.
https://doi.org/10.2307/796133
• Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn & Praëm, Sara Kier (2015). Philosophical thought experiments as heuristics for theory discovery. Synthese 192 (9):2827-2842.
• Weinberg, J. M., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2001). Normativity and epistemic intuitions. Philosophical Topics, 29, 429–460.
• Williamson, Timothy. 2007. The Philosophy of Philosophy. The Blackwell/Brown Lectures in Philosophy 2. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
