This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today’s leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, topics, and problems of the field. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike.

Already published in the series:

1. The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, Second Edition

Edited by Nicholas Bunnin and Eric Tsui-James

2. A Companion to Ethics

Edited by Peter Singer

3. A Companion to Aesthetics, Second Edition

Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper

4. A Companion to Epistemology, Second Edition

Edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup

5. A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (two-volume set), Second Edition

Edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit

6. A Companion to Philosophy of Mind

Edited by Samuel Guttenplan

7. A Companion to Metaphysics, Second Edition

Edited by Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa, and Gary S. Rosenkrantz

8. A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Second Edition

Edited by Dennis Patterson

9. A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition

Edited by Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn

10. A Companion to the Philosophy of Language

Edited by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright

11. A Companion to World Philosophies

Edited by Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe

12. A Companion to Continental Philosophy

Edited by Simon Critchley and William Schroeder

13. A Companion to Feminist Philosophy

Edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young

14. A Companion to Cognitive Science

Edited by William Bechtel and George Graham

15. A Companion to Bioethics, Second Edition

Edited by Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer

16. A Companion to the Philosophers

Edited by Robert L. Arrington

17. A Companion to Business Ethics

Edited by Robert E. Frederick

18. A Companion to the Philosophy of Science

Edited by W. H. Newton-Smith

19. A Companion to Environmental Philosophy

Edited by Dale Jamieson

20. A Companion to Analytic Philosophy

Edited by A. P. Martinich and David Sosa

21. A Companion to Genethics

Edited by Justine Burley and John Harris

22. A Companion to Philosophical Logic

Edited by Dale Jacquette

23. A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy

Edited by Steven Nadler

24. A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages

Edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone

25. A Companion to African-American Philosophy

Edited by Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman

26. A Companion to Applied Ethics

Edited by R. G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman

27. A Companion to the Philosophy of Education

Edited by Randall Curren

28. A Companion to African Philosophy

Edited by Kwasi Wiredu

29. A Companion to Heidegger

Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall

30. A Companion to Rationalism

Edited by Alan Nelson

31. A Companion to Pragmatism

Edited by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis

32. A Companion to Ancient Philosophy

Edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin

33. A Companion to Nietzsche

Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson

34. A Companion to Socrates

Edited by Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar

35. A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism

Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall

36. A Companion to Kant

Edited by Graham Bird

37. A Companion to Plato

Edited by Hugh H. Benson

38. A Companion to Descartes

Edited by Janet Broughton and John Carriero

39. A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology

Edited by Sahotra Sarkar and Anya Plutynski

40. A Companion to Hume

Edited by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe

41. A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography

Edited by Aviezer Tucker

42. A Companion to Aristotle

Edited by Georgios Anagnostopoulos

43. A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Edited by Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks

44. A Companion to Latin American Philosophy

Edited by Susana Nuccetelli, Ofelia Schutte, and Otávio Bueno

45. A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature

Edited by Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost

46. A Companion to the Philosophy of Action

Edited by Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sandis

47. A Companion to Relativism

Edited by Steven D. Hales

48. A Companion to Hegel

Edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur

49. A Companion to Schopenhauer

Edited by Bart Vandenabeele

50. A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy

Edited by Steven M. Emmanuel

51. A Companion to Foucault

Edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki

52. A Companion to the Philosophy of Time

Edited by Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon

53. A Companion to Donald Davidson

Edited by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig

54. A Companion to Rawls

Edited by Jon Mandle and David Reidy

55. A Companion to W.V.O Quine

Edited by Gilbert Harman and Ernest Lepore

56. A Companion to Derrida

Edited by Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor

57. A Companion to David Lewis

Edited by Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer

58. A Companion to Kierkegaard

Edited by Jon Stewart

59. A Companion to Locke

Edited by Matthew Stuart

60. A Companion to Ayn Rand

Edited by Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri

61. A Companion to Experimental Philosophy

Edited by Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter

Joshua Alexander is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Siena College, where he also directs the cognitive science program. His work focuses primarily on the nature of philosophical cognition and intellectual disagreement. He is the author of Experimental Philosophy – An Introduction (Polity, 2012).

Peter R. Anstey is ARC Future Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He specializes in early modern philosophy and is the author of John Locke and Natural Philosophy (Oxford, 2011).

James R. Beebe is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo and Director of the Experimental Epistemology Research Group.

Gunnar Björnsson is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Umeå University and Coordinator of the Moral Responsibility Research Initiative at the University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on issues in metaethics, moral psychology, and moral responsibility.

Berit Brogaard is Professor of Philosophy at University of Miami, Director of the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research and Professor II at University of Oslo.

Wesley Buckwalter is Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo.

Hoi-yee Chan is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Arizona.

Edward T. Cokely is Presidential Research Professor and Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in the Psychology of Skilled and Informed Decision Making. He also serves as research faculty at the MaPlanck Institute for Human Development (DE) and the National Institute for Risk and Resilience (USA), and is co-managing director of RiskLiteracy.org.

Florian Cova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences at the University of Geneva

Fiery Cushman is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Mike Dacey is a graduate student in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

David Danks is Professor of Philosophy & Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His main areas of research are computational cognitive science, philosophy of cognitive science, and machine learning. He is the author of Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models (MIT Press) and articles in numerous journals.

Max Deutsch is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong.

Igor Douven is Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

Matt L. Drabek is Content Specialist at ACT, Inc. and Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The University of Iowa. He is the author of Classify and Label: The Unintended Marginalization of Social Groups (Lexington Books, 2014).

Adam Feltz is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Applied Ethics at Michigan Technological University where he directs the Ethical Decision-Making and Ethical Naturalism Laboratory and is co-managing director of RiskLiteracy.org.

Carrie Figdor is Associate Professor of Philosophy and core faculty in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Iowa. Her primary research is in philosophy of psychology and neuroscience, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. She is also coauthor, with Molly Paxton and Valerie Tiberius, of ‘Quantifying the Gender Gap: An Empirical Study of the Underrepresentation of Women in Philosophy’ (Hypatia, 2012).

Ori Friedman is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo.

Joshua D. Greene is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Nicole Hassoun is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University. She has published widely in journals such as American Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Development Economics, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophy and Economics. Her book Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations was published with Cambridge University Press in 2012 and her manuscript Global Health Impact: Extending Access on Essential Medicines for the Poor is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Bryce Huebner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.

Joshua Knobe is Professor of Cognitive Science and Philosophy at Yale University.

Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago.

Adam Lerner is a graduate student in Philosophy at Princeton University.

Sarah-Jane Leslie is Class of 1943 Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Program in Linguistics, and Founding Director of the Program in Cognitive Science at Princeton University. She is also affiliated with the Department of Psychology, the University Center for Human Values, and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Jonathan Livengood is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Psychology of Philosophy Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is coauthor of The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy (Broadview, 2016), with Justin Sytsma, in addition to numerous articles.

Tania Lombrozo is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an affiliate of the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Her research focuses on explanation, abductive inference, causal reasoning, learning, conceptual representation, and social cognition.

Edouard Machery is Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, Associate Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (University of Pittsburgh-Carnegie Mellon University), and Adjunct Research Professor, Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Doing without Concepts (OUP, 2009) as well as the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality (OUP, 2012), La Philosophie Expérimentale (Vuibert, 2012), Arguing about Human Nature (Routledge, 2013), and Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy (Routledge, 2014). He has been the editor of the Naturalistic Philosophy section of Philosophy Compass since 2012.

Ron Mallon is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

Justin W. Martin is a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University.

Charles J. Millar is a law student at the University of Toronto.

Kaija Mortensen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Randolph College. Her work focuses on intuitions, thought experiments, and the nature of philosophical expertise.

Jennifer Nagel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

Shaylene E. Nancekivell is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Waterloo.

Shaun Nichols is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona.

Juhwa Park is Research Fellow at Korea Institute for National Unification.

L.A. Paul is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Professorial Fellow at Arche, the University of St. Andrews. She is the author of Transformative Experience (OUP, 2014) and coauthor, with Ned Hall, of Causation: A User’s Guide (OUP, 2013).

Elliot Samuel Paul is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is coeditor of The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2014) and cofounder of The Creativity Post (creativitypost.com).

Derk Pereboom is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University.

Mark Phelan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lawrence University.

Ángel Pinillos is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University.

Alexandra Plakias is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College.

David Ripley is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

David Rose is a graduate student in philosophy at Rutgers University.

Joshua Rust is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stetson University.

Richard Samuels is Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University.

Hagop Sarkissian is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The City University of New York, Baruch College. His research spans topics in ethics, moral psychology, classical Chinese philosophy, and comparative philosophy. His work has been translated into Chinese and Korean.

Jonah N. Schupbach is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research interests include epistemology (formal and mainstream), logic, and the psychology of human reasoning. He has published numerous articles in top journals, including The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Philosophy of Science.

Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Riverside. His most recent book is Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT, 2011).

Steven A. Sloman is Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University.

Stephen Stich is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of the Jean Nicod Prize, and was the first recipient of the Gittler Award for Outstanding Scholarly Contribution in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, awarded by the American Philosophical Association.

Dustin Stokes is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah.

Pauline C. Summers is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Waterloo.

Justin Sytsma is Senior Lecturer in the philosophy programme at Victoria University of Wellington. His research focuses on issues in philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind. As a practitioner of experimental philosophy, Justin’s research into these areas often involves the use of empirical methods. He is co-author of The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy (Broadview, 2016), with Jonathan Livengood, in addition to numerous articles.

Daniel Telech is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Kevin P. Tobia is a graduate student in philosophy at Yale University.

Lily Tsoi is a graduate student in psychology at Boston College.

John Turri is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Member of the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Waterloo. He directs the Philosophical Science Lab.

Alberto Vanzo is AHRC Early-Career Research Fellow of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Warwick. He works on Kant’s philosophy, early-modern natural philosophy, and the history and methodology of philosophical historiography.

Jonathan M. Weinberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona.

Timothy Williamson is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University. His publications include Identity and Discrimination, Vagueness, Knowledge and its Limits, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Tetralogue, and about 200 academic articles on logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. He has held visiting positions at MIT, ANU, Canterbury University (NZ), Princeton, UNAM (Mexico), Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Michigan, and Yale.

Jennifer Cole Wright is Associate Professor at the College of Charleston. Her area of research is moral development and moral psychology more generally. Specifically, she studies meta-ethical pluralism, the influence of individual and social “liberal vs. conservative” mindsets on moral judgments, and young children’s early moral development. She coedited, with Hagop Sarkissian, Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology and is currently coauthoring a book titled Virtue Measurement: Theory and Application with Nancy Snow.

This volume would not have been possible without the help and support of many people. We would like to thank Edouard Machery and Joshua Knobe, who served as Advisory Editors on this project, and Liam Cooper, Sally Cooper, and Roshna Mohan at Wiley-Blackwell for their work during various stages of production. We are grateful to all contributors for sharing their research with us, and for all those who served as anonymous reviewers. Finally, we acknowledge that this research was supported by a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to Wesley Buckwalter through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Experimental philosophy is a way of doing philosophy. The basic idea is to use empirical methods and techniques typically associated with the sciences to help investigate philosophical questions. This is a very broad and inclusive definition of experimental philosophy. While it has been defined in various ways, often more narrow in scope, the guiding notion behind experimental philosophy is that observation and experimentation are tools that can be used to conduct philosophical inquiry. The purpose of this volume is to introduce you to the empirical approaches being used in philosophy and the ways that these approaches benefit philosophical inquiry.

The idea that philosophy can benefit from empirical inquiry is not new. As far back as Ancient Greece, philosophers called on empirical observations to inform their philosophical accounts. One clear example is Aristotle’s systematic investigations of animals in History of Animals and Generation of Animals. One goal Aristotle had in these works was to understand what is distinct about human beings by comparing and contrasting their biological features to those of nonhuman animals. Aristotle also thought that empirical observations were relevant to philosophy in another way. In the Nichomachean Ethics, he claimed that the best approach to philosophy was to find a balance between different views about a philosophical topic “in the light not only of our conclusion and our premises, but also of what is commonly said about it” (1098b, 9–10). Of course, the best way to learn what is commonly said about a topic is also by making observations, and by listening to views that don’t just come from one particular person or group.

Other philosophers, like David Hume, focused on the use of empirical methods in the study of human nature. Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature that “we can hope for success in our philosophical researches” by studying “all those sciences, which more intimately concern human life.” Hume thought we could begin to understand philosophical phenomena, like morality, perception, or causation, by first studying our own minds. When it comes to studying the human mind, Hume claimed that it was “impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from its different circumstances and situations” (Book I, 6–8).

These examples illustrate two ways in which empirical methods can be used to inform philosophical inquiries. They can be used to directly investigate philosophical phenomena. They can also be used to understand how we think and talk about those phenomena. Both of these approaches are well represented in the history of philosophy. To give but a few more examples, René Descartes’ dissections of ox eyes informed his theory of visual perception, while Isaac Newton’s theory of colors was informed by his observations of the reflections, refractions, and inflections of light through a prism. These philosophers each employed empirical methods even though they are often associated with very different philosophical traditions.

Contemporary experimental philosophers return to these ways of doing philosophy. They conduct controlled experiments, and empirical studies more generally, to explore both phenomena of philosophical interest and how we think about those phenomena. In doing so, they use a wide range of techniques that were unavailable to philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, Newton, and Hume. These techniques borrow from approaches to empirical study developed in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, behavioral economics, and computer science, among other fields. These approaches have utilized both basic techniques of science as well as the latest technological developments such as brain imaging, big-data searches, advanced statistics, and causal modeling. Today experimental philosophers continue to find new and exciting ways of combining questions and techniques from both the sciences and philosophy. This work helps us to understand our reality, who we are as people, and the choices we make about important philosophical matters that shape our lives. Experimental philosophers also argue that these kinds of studies can provide insight into philosophical phenomena themselves, though the details vary from one philosophical issue to another.

This volume provides a handbook to these developments in experimental philosophy. It is separated into two parts. The first part situates experimental philosophy within Western philosophy, both currently and historically, and explores the various motivations for and impact of the experimental turn in philosophy. Though there is a long historical precedent for experimental philosophy, some philosophers have objected to the application of empirical methods in philosophical inquiry. This section includes some of the leading proponents as well as prominent critics of experimental philosophy. They discuss different conceptions of experimental philosophy and, more generally, the impact the practice has for philosophical methodology. Together we hope that these chapters will give the reader a sense of different perspectives on and approaches to experimental philosophy that are found within the discipline today.

The second part of the volume surveys some of the most important work that has been done by contemporary experimental philosophers. These chapters detail the application of empirical methods to questions from nearly every major sub-discipline of academic philosophy. Research areas include central topics in the philosophy of action, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, logic, and metaphilosophy. These chapters not only review the empirical research that has been conducted surrounding a particular philosophical question but also describe several ways in which future empirical research might contribute to philosophical inquiry. It is our hope that these chapters will serve as both an introduction to this research and a research tool that will help guide future experimental study in philosophy.