We are pleased to announce the public launch of a new PhilPapers project: the Philosophical Survey.  The aim of the Philosophical Survey is to discover information about the distribution of philosophical views among professional philosophers and others.

The survey contains thirty questions, each giving a choice between 2-4 views on a philosophical issue (for example, "Analytic-synthetic distinction: Yes or no?"; "Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?"). Respondents can indicate that they accept or lean toward one of the options or can give one of a variety of "other" answers.  We have kept the questions as simple as possible, as clarification would be a never-ending process.  We will also ask for some optional background information.

We have already launched the survey by email invitation to 2000 philosophers in 100 leading departments of philosophy worldwide.  We are now opening up the survey so that anyone can take it.  We especially encourage professional philosophers and graduate students to take the survey, but anyone interested is welcome to take part.

You can take the survey by going to this page. To take the survey, you must either have a PhilPapers account or must create a guest survey account, which will require a valid email address.  This requirement helps to minimize survey abuse and to maximize the reliability of responses.  Individual answers will not be publicly disclosed without participants' authorization.

An information page available at the survey site contains further details about the use and privacy of the information you provide, and about the methodology of the survey.  The study has been approved by the ANU Human Research Ethics Committee.

Each respondent to the survey will also be invited to take part in a follow-up survey: the Philosophical Metasurvey. The Metasurvey will ask subjects for their best estimates of the distributions of answers to the Philosophical Survey.  The Metasurvey will allow us to compare philosophical views within the profession to beliefs about the distribution of these views.

Once again, you can take the Survey here.  Discussion and feedback can be posted here.