Philosophical Methodology offers an up-to-date assessment of different methods of doing philosophy, and develops a novel account of the structure and goals of inquiry, a fresh analysis of philosophical data, and a nuanced approach to philosophical theorizing. It allows philosophers and students of philosophy to better understand their topics, and shows how philosophy can continue to make progress in answering its central questions.

Many prominent critiques of philosophical methods proceed by suggesting that some method is unreliable, especially in comparison to some alternative method. In light of this, it may seem natural to conclude that these (comparatively) unreliable methods should be abandoned. Drawing upon work on the division of cognitive labour in science, we argue things are not so straightforward. Rather, whether an unreliable method should be abandoned depends heavily on the crucial question of how we should divide philosophers’ time and effort (...) between different methods, in order to maximise our prospects of achieving epistemic success. We show that, in a range of cases, even a (comparatively) unreliable method deserves to be allocated some of these resources. (shrink)

What methodology should philosophers follow? Should they rely on methods that can be conducted from the armchair? Or should they leave the armchair and turn to the methods of the natural sciences, such as experiments in the laboratory? Or is this opposition itself a false one? Arguments about philosophical methodology are raging in the wake of a number of often conflicting currents, such as the growth of experimental philosophy, the resurgence of interest in metaphysical questions, and the (...) use of formal methods. This outstanding collection of specially-commissioned chapters by leading international philosophers discusses these questions and many more. It provides a comprehensive survey of philosophical methodology in the most important philosophical subjects: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, philosophy of science, ethics, and aesthetics. A key feature of the collection is that philosophers discuss and evaluate contrasting approaches in each subject, offering a superb overview of the variety of methodological approaches - both naturalistic and non-naturalistic - in each of these areas. They examine important topics at the heart of methodological argument, including the role of intuitions and conceptual analysis, thought experiments, introspection, and the place that results from the natural sciences should have in philosophical theorizing. The collection begins with a fascinating exchange about philosophical naturalism between Timothy Williamson and Alexander Rosenberg, and also includes contributions from the following philosophers: Lynne Rudder Baker, Matt Bedke, Greg Currie, Michael Devitt, Matthew C. Haug, Jenann Ismael, Hilary Kornblith, Neil Levy, E.J. Lowe, Kirk Ludwig, Marie McGinn, David Papineau, Matthew Ratcliffe, Georges Rey, Jeffrey W. Roland, Barry C. Smith, Amie L. Thomasson, Valerie Tiberius, Jessica Wilson, and David W. Smith. (shrink)

Methodology is understood here to include methods, approaches, and styles, which are not always easy to separate. This article deals with all three, focusing on ones that have been influential in Australasia, or have developed there, through the efforts of thinkers who have either been born in Australasia, or trained or worked there for a significant period.

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to (...) essays about the interconnections between philosophy and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology offers clear and comprehensive coverage of the main methodological debates and approaches within philosophy. The chapters in this volume approach the question of how to do philosophy from a wide range of perspectives, including conceptual analysis, critical theory, deconstruction, experimental philosophy, hermeneutics, Kantianism, methodological naturalism, phenomenology, and pragmatism. They explore general conceptions of philosophy, centred on the question of what the point of philosophising might be; the method of conceptual analysis and its (...) recent naturalistic critics and competitors; perspectives from continental philosophy; and also a variety of methodological views that belong neither to the mainstream of analytic philosophy, nor to continental philosophy as commonly conceived. Together they will enable readers to grasp an unusually wide range of approaches to methodological debates in philosophy. (shrink)

Ambitious intellectual endeavours often include methodological preliminaries. Such preliminaries give their authors the opportunity to clarify aims, set terms of evaluation, orient readers for the...

Tamar Gendler draws together a series of essays in which she investigates philosophical methodology, and shows the value for philosophy of empirical psychology. Three intertwined themes run through the volume: imagination, intuition and philosophical methodology: Gendler explores how we engage with subject matter that we take to be imaginary.

This article offers an overview of philosophical methodologies. In an attempt to avoid a certain circularity, the article itself tries to avoid consciously or solely deploying and engaging with any current standard notion of what constitutes a philosophical method or philosophy itself. It hopes to find some of the possible places in which philosophy occurs, and this turns out to include such endeavours as literature, art, poetry, and linguistics. From here it considers how almost anything—for example, conversation, everyday (...) life, and love—can also be philosophy. An attempt is made to identify some characteristic feature of philosophy as it occurs in all such forms. In the end, the simultaneous enacting of a peculiar optimism and particular humility both, in the search for knowledge, is put forward as potentially sufficient to at least begin to identify philosophy across its many guises. (shrink)

The volume provides clear and comprehensive coverage of the main methodological debates and approaches within philosophy. The book gives equal weight to analytical and continental approaches, and pays attention to approaches that are often overlooked.

This book collects original essays on the epistemology of modality and related issues in modal metaphysics and philosophical methodology. The contributors utilize both the newer metaphysics-first and the more traditional epistemology-first approaches to these issues. The chapters on modal epistemology mostly focus on the problem of how we can gain knowledge of possibilities, which have never been actualized, or necessities which are not provable either by logico-mathematical reasoning or by linguistic competence alone. These issues are closely related to (...) some of the central issues in philosophical methodology, notably: to what extent is the armchair methodology of philosophy a reliable guide for the formation of beliefs about what is possible and necessary. This question also relates to the nature of thought experiments that are extensively used in science and philosophy. Epistemology of Modality and Philosophical Methodology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on the epistemology and metaphysics of modality, as well as those whose work is concerned with philosophical methodology more generally. (shrink)

Intuition serves a variety of roles in contemporary philosophy. This paper provides a historical discussion of the revival of intuition in the 1970s, untangling some of the ways that intuition has been used and offering some suggestions concerning its proper place in philosophical investigation. Contrary to some interpretations of the results of experimental philosophy, it is argued that generalized skepticism with respect to intuition is unwarranted. Intuition can continue to play an important role as part of a methodologically conservative (...) stance towards philosophical investigation. I argue that methodological conservatism should be sharply distinguished from the process of evaluating individual propositions. Nevertheless, intuition is not always a reliable guide to truth and experimental philosophy can serve a vital ameliorative role in determining the scope and limits of our intuitive competence with respect to various areas of inquiry. (shrink)

Conceptual analysis aims to uncover the basic criteria of concepts that underwrite categorizing members via the method of cases. However, conceptual analysis has not been very successful and experimental philosophy has increasingly detailed this lack of success. This essay reviews Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy by Michael Strevens, which attempts a novel defence of conceptual analysis. It is a strategic intervention that seems to preserve a relatively traditional picture of philosophical inquiry. I concentrate on (...) several assumptions in this intervention that might be questioned and conclude there are good reasons to continue an interrogation of how we understand the philosophical enterprise. Ideally, this might encourage us to rebuild our picture of what philosophy is. (shrink)

This article explores the use of philosophical methodology in linguistics and the role of linguistic methodology in philosophy. More specifically, it considers the borrowing of prima facie philosophical methodologies by linguistics and vice versa, gives some examples of this methodological borrowing, clarifies what the aim of it has been, and makes the case for the fruitfulness of these efforts. It also discusses the role of appeals to semantics in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language, and (...) examines whether the prima facie distinction between linguistic and philosophical methodology holds up in any interesting sense. Finally, it suggests that methodology in linguistics and in particular the semantics of natural language is intimately intertwined with methodology in numerous areas of philosophy. (shrink)

In recent years a new discussion on the nature of philosophical expertise has emerged: whether philosophers possess a special kind of expertise, what such expertise would entail, how to measure it, and related concerns. The aim of the present article is to clarify certain related points across these debates in the hope of paving a clearer path forward, by addressing the following. (1) The expertise defense, which seems central to many discussions on methodology and expertise, has been misconstrued (...) at times. (2) Questions of expertise and methodology could be separated more clearly. (3) The study of expertise may be important in its own right; however, there may be good reasons to give priority to methodological concerns. (4) Finally, when viewed in light of methodological concerns, a new project emerges when engaging with recent contributions to the expertise debate. The present article attempts a brief outline of this project. (shrink)

In the paper, a philosophical and methodological analysis of the evolution of cybernetics in the context of the development of scientific rationality is carried out. The evolution of cybernetics is represented as a movement from the methodology of “observable systems” and to the methodology of “observing systems” and to the methodology of self-developing reflexive-active environments. Special attention is paid to the formation of a new promising direction for post-non-classical cybernetics of self-developing poly-subject environments, which, given the (...) correlation with previous stages of cybernetics development, we define as thirdorder cybernetics. The analysis of the basics of the formation of third-order cybernetics was carried out with consideration of interrelated aspects: philosophical, methodological, theoretical, and methodical. We also provide model of self-developing poly-subject environments as well as a system of ontologies, defining the mechanisms of functioning of such self-organizing poly-subject environments and active elements that organize the communication space. The ontology system also makes it possible to integrate cybernetics of the first, second, and third order. Some sociohumanitarian trends in the development of cybernetics are considered: from an external observer to a distributed observer; from monodisciplinary to transdisciplinary approaches; from activity approach to subject-activity one, and further to subject-oriented approach; from information to active knowledge; from ethics of goals to ethics of strategic subjects. Potential opportunities for using third-order cybernetics are described, in order to improve the quality of solving a number of important scientific and practical problems of controlling social systems. Information is provided on the directions of approbation of a third-order cybernetics concept for improving state administration, based on a system of distributed situational centers, and there is its approbation at international scientific conferences. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy, at least in its ‘negative’ variety, has standardly been portrayed as presenting a dramatic challenge to traditional philosophical methodology. As such, it has prompted a large variety of counter-arguments and defenses of intuition. In this paper, I argue that many of these objections to experimental philosophy rest on various oversimplifications that both experimental philosophers and their opponents have made regarding intuitions and philosophical methodology. Once these oversimplifications are abandoned, I argue that the experimentalist critique (...) of current philosophical methods becomes somewhat less dramatic, but also much less open to objection. (shrink)

The rise of experimental philosophy is generating pressing methodological questions for philosophers. Can findings from experimental studies hold any significance for philosophy as a discipline? Can philosophical theorizing be improved through consideration of such studies? Do these studies threaten traditional philosophical methodology?

There is considerable philosophical dispute about what it takes for an action to be evil. The methodological assumption underlying this dispute is that there is a single, shared folk conception of evil action deployed amongst culturally similar people. Empirical research we undertook suggests that this assumption is false. There exist, amongst the folk, numerous conceptions of evil action. Hence, we argue, philosophical research is most profitably spent in two endeavours. First, in determining which (if any) conception of evil (...) action we have prudential or moral (or both) reason to deploy, and second, in determining whether we could feasibly come to adopt that conception as the single shared conception given our psychological make-up and the content of the conceptions currently deployed. (shrink)

...how do we train residents to employ ethical reasoning? This is a good question, not only for the problem of strikes, but also for all medical training. The best method is inductive, since that most closely parallels the clinical reasoning processes that define the reality of medical practice. The strengths of inductive reasoning are that it most closely matches the realities of practice, it arises from the particular circumstances of the case, and it leads to a casuistic conclusion that applies (...) more directly than abstract reasoning models to the problem at hand. The weaknesses, though, require that inductive models include a check and balance. (shrink)

L’un des défis posés par l’inclusion des soi-disant philosophies «non-occidentales» dans le discours de la philosophie «occidentale» a trait au fait que plusieurs textes philosophiques non-occidentaux diffèrent de façon significative, en termes de style et d’approche, des textes occidentaux, principalement ceux issus de la philosophie analytique contemporaine. Comment établir un dialogue constructif entre des textes écrits de façon littéraire, qui n’ont pas l’allure d’un exposé et qui n’avancent pas clairement des positions ou des arguments philosophiques et des textes qui, au (...) contraire, prennent la forme d’un exposé avançant des positions ou des arguments? Pourquoi, de prime abord, voudrait-on ouvrir un tel dialogue? Cet article pose ces questions par le biais de l’étude du cas du classique taoïste, leZhuāngzǐ. (shrink)

On the question of precisely what role common sense (or related datum like folk psychology, trust in pre-theoretic/intuitive judgments, etc.) should have in reigning in the possible excesses of our philosophical methods, the so-called ‘continental’ answer to this question, for the vast majority, would be “as little as possible”, whereas the analytic answer for the vast majority would be “a reasonably central one”. While this difference at the level of both rhetoric and meta-philosophy is sometimes – perhaps often – (...) problematised by the actual philosophical practices of representative philosophers of either tradition, I will argue that this norm (and its absence) nonetheless continues to play an important justificatory role in relation to the use of some rather different methodological practices. In particular, many analytic philosophers not only explicitly invoke the value of common sense, but they also implicitly value it via techniques like conceptual analysis that want to explicate folk psychology and/or lay bare what is already embedded in the linguistic norms of a given culture, the widespread use of thought experiments and the way they function as ‘intuition pumps’, as well as the general aim to achieve ‘reflective equilibrium’ between our intuitions and reflective judgments in epistemology and political philosophy. Such methods, I will argue, enshrine a conservative, or, more positively, a modest understanding of the philosophical project in that it is invested in cohering with both a given body of knowledge and common sense. These methods are notably less perspicuous in continental philosophy. To bring some of the reasons why this might be so to the fore, this paper considers Deleuze’s sustained attack on both good and common sense, which he argues are fundamental to the prevalence of a dogmatic image of thought. If Deleuze is right about this, and if the analytic tradition distils and perfects certain methods that are closely associated with this image of thought, then we have here a rather stark methodological contrast that calls for elaboration and evaluation. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to discuss Safavid period Islamic philosopher Sadraddin Shirazi’s philosophical methodology and the sources of the school founded by him. The article relies on research conducted on Shirazi philosophy. It shows that Shirazi through synthesizing the methods of the earlier schools that existed in Islam to acquire knowledge devised a new mechanism for acquiring knowledge. Before coming to Shirazi, intellectual movements formed during Islam’s classical period, such as peripateticism, illuminationism, theology and Gnosticism, were (...) of different views regarding the best way to reach the truth. For example, for peripatetics reason, for theologians revelation, for gnostics/mystics intuition or personal experience were important, but ishraqi school was somewhere between peripatetic and Gnostic schools. Sadraddin Shirazi, though, considered all these agents necessary, for they complement each other, and said they should be utilized altogether to obtain ultimate reality. Similarly, considering his philosophical sources, we see that he is influenced almost by all philosophical schools as well as religious sources. However, Ibn Sina and Ibn Arabi’s influence on him was more profound compared to other philosophers. (shrink)

It is impossible to study philosophical methodology without being struck by the state of absolute chaos of the field’s methodological practices, methodological norms, and metaphilosophical beliefs. Not only are the methods of formal epistemology nothing like the methods of aesthetics, but even within specific debates and subfields, there are often significant disagreements about standards of proof, to say nothing about disagreements about the ultimate nature of the debate. The question facing metaphilosophers is whether this chaos is a feature (...) or a bug. Is the chaos a part of philosophy’s value as an incubator for new ideas or a sign that many philosophers have lost their way and are holding back philosophical progress? (shrink)

According to Conceptualism, philosophy is an independent discipline that can be pursued from the armchair because philosophy seeks truths that can be discovered purely on the basis of our understanding of expressions and the concepts they express. In his recent book, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Timothy Williamson argues that while philosophy can indeed be pursued from the armchair, we should reject any form of Conceptualism. In this paper, we show that Williamson’s arguments against Conceptualism are not successful, and we sketch (...) a way to understand understanding that shows that there is a clear sense in which we can indeed come to know the answers to (many) philosophical questions purely on the basis of understanding. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, feminist philosophy has become recognised as a philosophical sub-discipline in its own right. Among the ‘core’ areas of philosophy, metaphysics has nonetheless until relatively recently remained largely dismissive of it. Metaphysics typically investigates the basic structure of reality and its nature. It examines reality's putative building blocks and inherent structure supposedly ‘out there’ with the view to uncovering and elucidating that structure. For this task, feminist insights appear simply irrelevant. Moreover, the value-neutrality of metaphysics (...) seems prima facie incompatible with feminism's explicitly normative stance in that feminist philosophy involves advocacy: speaking on behalf of some group on political grounds. The prospects of feminist metaphysics thus look grim. Nonetheless, feminist philosophers have in recent years increasingly taken up explicitly metaphysical investigations. The basic ideas behind such investigations can be summed up as follows: feminist metaphysics is about negotiating the natural and going beyond the fundamental. In so doing, feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics. Further, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. With this in mind, the article considers the following questions: when thinking about philosophical methodology, how does feminist metaphysics fare relative to ‘mainstream’ metaphysics? More specifically, is feminism's political advocacy inconsistent with apparent objectivity that some prominent contemporary versions of metaphysics are committed to? (shrink)

A reorientation is needed in methodological debate about the role of intuitions in philosophy. Methodological debate has lost sight of the reason why it makes sense to focus on questions about intuitions when thinking about the methods or epistemology of philosophy. The problem is an approach to methodology that focuses almost exclusively on questions about some evidential role that intuitions may or may not play in philosophers’ arguments. A new approach is needed. Approaching methodological questions about the role of (...) intuitions in philosophy with an abductive model of philosophical inquiry in mind will help ensure the debate doesn't lose sight of what motivates the debate. (shrink)

This paper traces the genealogy of a long-enduring controversy in Western philosophy viz, whether philosophic and mathematical methodologies are equal but separate and distinct approaches to rational inquiry, or whether one is superior to the other from the standpoint of epistemology, and, ultimately, a pedagogy which supports and promotes conceptual and critical thinking. With the Socratic teacher in mind, philosophic methodology, viewed by Plato as a dialectical process of free-ranging inquiry, compelled him to distinguish the work of philosophy from (...) that of mathematics, since philosophic methodology could not function unless freed from the constraints contained in a system built on axioms, propositions, and images. In his dialogue Meno, Socrates’ pedagogic demonstration, supported by the unique capacity of mathematics to provide epistemic closure, foreshadowed a slow-growing rift between philosophy and mathematics, one which came to a head in the 17th century rationalism of Descartes. In Descartes’ work on methodology, mathematics, by overriding the seemingly inconclusive meanderings of philosophy, became the supreme pathway to knowledge. Philosophy, thereafter, had to fight for its life, while pedagogy, questing more and more for “completeness” through formalization, ironically moved toward a fragmentation and reductionism which a mathematized Cartesian methodology supported. The curriculum divisions which resulted were presaged in Descartes’ writing on methodology; the isolation of the individual learner from the larger community of discourse was supported by Descartes’ “cogito.” Suggested here is that a pedagogic approach to the teaching of mathematics, which extends beyond the limitations of the “single solution” methodology utilized in Meno, is possible—an approach which allows pedagogy to spread the Socratic use of dialectical thinking even into that sphere of apodicticity. This suggests that an alternative to the monistic rationalism of Descartes’ mathematized methodology is possible for pedagogy in general, now bringing back into play what Descartes found expendable—viz. dialectical philosophy itself, dialogical inquiry, history, literature, and the arts. Had Socrates, who came to philosophy primarily as a teacher fascinated with intellectual paradoxes, explored, in Meno, the pedagogic possibility of a dialectical approach to mathematics, his larger work in dialectical pedagogy might have been less teacher-centered—notwithstanding his ironic “ignorance”; and given his historic significance as the most celebrated teacher in Western culture, modern pedagogy might have been less overwhelmed by the Cartesian drive toward mechanized and reductionist “single-solution,” non-communal teaching and thinking. (shrink)

This paper examines the legitimacy of two common methodologies within philosophy: thought experiments and conceptual analysis. In particular, I examine the uses to which these two methodologies have been put within modal epistemology. I argue that, although both methods can be used to reveal conditional essentialist claims (e.g. necessarily: if x is water, then x is H20), neither can be used to reveal the de re essentialists claims (e.g. x is water and x is essentially H20) they’re often taken to (...) reveal. (shrink)

Tamar Gendler draws together in this book a series of essays in which she investigates philosophical methodology, which is now emerging as a central topic of philosophical discussions. Three intertwined themes run through the volume: imagination, intuition and philosophical methodology. Each of the chapters focuses, in one way or another, on how we engage with subject matter that we take to be imaginary--and they explore the implications of this for how thought experiments and appeals to (...) intuition can serve as mechanisms for supporting or refuting scientific or philosophical claims. Gendler promotes the value of engaging in such cross-disciplinary conversations in illuminating philosophical issues. (shrink)

Recent empirical studies raise methodological concerns about the use of intuitions in philosophy. According to one prominent line of reply, these concerns are unwarranted since the empirical studies motivating them do not control for the putatively characteristic phenomenology of intuitions. This paper makes use of research on metacognitive states that have precisely this phenomenology to argue that the above reply fails. Furthermore, it shows that empirical findings about these metacognitive states can help philosophers make better informed assessments of their warrant (...) for relying on intuitions in inquiry. (shrink)

Philosophy has a wealth of heuristics—philosophical heuristics—although they have not been well documented or studied. Sometimes they draw attention to a problem with a philosophical position—for example, it involves a problematic definite description, or it has to make a choice that seems arbitrary. Sometimes they provide solutions to a problem—for example, there are many techniques for handling arbitrariness. Sometimes they suggest ways of replacing hard problems with easier ones, with strategies for approaching the latter—for example, replacing intensional notions (...) with extensional surrogates, and then perhaps diagramming the latter. Sometimes they appeal to fertile modes of thinking more generally—for example, continuity reasoning. Philosophers have been becoming increasingly self-conscious of their methodology, yet I believe that the study of such heuristics has been surprisingly neglected. This chapter highlights the importance of philosophical heuristics to philosophical methodology. It considers especially a cluster involving the notion of resemblance. (shrink)

This article discusses what kind of thing a philosophical methodology is or would be, and what kind of questions would count as methodological. The primary focus is on a “higher-order” reading, on which admissible answers are the epistemological methods that distinguish philosophy from the natural sciences and the humanities, or the pursuit of a description of reality at the most fundamental level. The article uses the term “Philosophical Methodology” to pick out questions of the higher order, (...) and “philosophical methodology” for questions of the lower order. To provide a robust data pool, it takes all occurrences of the word “methodological” in entries of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophynford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and considers what plausible theories of Philosophical Methodology can be fitted into that range of usage. It also discusses seven hypotheses that account for the nature of Philosophical Methodology: Eliminativism, Working-Hypothesism, Epistemologism, Theory Selectionism, Necessary Preconditionalism, Hierarchicalism, and Eliminatedivism. (shrink)

Ralph Weber’s recent criticism sheds light on the methodological predicament of comparative philosophy. I examine Weber’s analytical tool and argue that its general applicability and potential unbridled use can lead to a conflict between its own legitimacy and the legitimacy of comparative philosophy as an established sui generis sub-discipline of philosophy which largely functions as “intercultural” or “trans-cultural philosophy”. I defend the cultural approach, and argue that comparative philosophy should be viewed as philosophical data analysis from different spatiotemporal origins, (...) in order to achieve better explanatory power for philosophical study. I point out that philosophy in China has its own peculiar methodological predicament. The comparative study of philosophy is a joint project of inter-cultural dialogue that rests on the collective effort of global participants. (shrink)

This article explores the role of logic in philosophical methodology, as well as its application in philosophy. The discussion gives a roughly equal coverage to the seven branches of logic: elementary logic, set theory, model theory, recursion theory, proof theory, extraclassical logics, and anticlassical logics. Mathematical logic comprises set theory, model theory, recursion theory, and proof theory. Philosophical logic in the relevant sense is divided into the study of extensions of classical logic, such as modal or temporal (...) or deontic or conditional logics, and the study of alternatives to classical logic, such as intuitionistic or quantum or partial or paraconsistent logics. The nonclassical consists of the extraclassical and the anticlassical, although the distinction is not clearcut. (shrink)

To establish the scientific-theoretical and philosophical- methodological foundations for the transition from classical set theory (Cantor set) to fuzzy set theory, the mathematical and ontological structures of the Cantor set are presented in a localized manner. This approach aligns with the research direction, incorporating philosophical reflections on the fundamental concepts of this theory, such as infinity, continuum, and the empty set. Particular emphasis is placed on infinity and infinite sets (countable and continuum), which are crucial to the development (...) of set theory as a scientific field and have been subjects of inquiry in both scientific and philosophical cognitive processes from ancient times to the present. In addition, a relatively concise explanation of the mathematical and ontological structures of both classical set theory and fuzzy set theory is provided. Through certain epistemological and cognitive approaches, the article identifies the scientific-theoretical and philosophical-methodological bases for the emergence of fuzzy set theory, framed within the context of the scientific-philosophical reflections on classical set theory and its core concepts. (shrink)

This chapter considers Ernest Sosa’s contributions to philosophical methodology. In Section 1, Sosa’s approach to the role of intuitions in the epistemology of philosophy is considered and related to his broader virtue-theoretic epistemological framework. Of particular focus is the question whether false or unjustified intuitions may justify. Section 2 considers Sosa’s response to sceptical challenges about intuitions, especially those deriving from experimental philosophy. I argue that Sosa’s attempt to attribute apparent disagreement in survey data to difference in meaning (...) fails, but that some of his other, more general, responses to experimentalist sceptics succeed. (shrink)

A review of *Philosophical Methodology: From Data to Theory* by John Bengson, Terence Cuneo and Russ Shafer-Landau.