The Science of Philosophy?
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Christopher Shea looks into the rise of Experimental Philosophy:
At the heart of experimental philosophy lies a suspicion of so-called “intuitions.” An intuition in philosophy is something far more potent than it is in ordinary discourse….The trustworthiness of intuitions (whose roots can be traced back to Plato and Socrates, who thought they represented glimpses of the true, ideal world usually hidden from us) hardly goes undebated by traditional philosophers – quite the opposite – but the experimental philosophers apply a new kind of pressure. They think that by studying human minds, using empirical techniques, and drawing on the insights of modern psychological science, they can get a better sense of where intuitions come from, and whether or when they should be granted credence.
Link from Arts & Letters Daily.