For those who are interested in the international diffusion of experimental philosophy, I wanted to signal the recent publication of a second french book dedicated to experimental philosophy : Ruwen Ogien's L'Influence de l'Odeur des Croissants Chauds sur la Bonté Humaine, et autres questions de philosophie morale expérimentale. It's mainly about moral philosophy (trolley problems and all the stuff) and it also includes under the label "moral experimental philosophy" the work of situationist psychologists.
Here's a fun excerpt I translate to share with you:
The idea to run experiments about behaviour to confirm hypotheses about "human nature" is nothing new.
Kant was very fond of this kind of exercise, for which he probably wasn't very gifted. One of his hypotheses was that a woman would sulk longer if she was told she's old (it's objective) than if shewas told she's ugly (it's subjective).
(It is said that he really tested this hypothesis on his sisters, which, nowadays, would have probably costed him to be pursued for mental cruelty : Louis Ernest Borowski, Reinhold Berhnard Jachmann et Ehrgott André Wasianski, Kant Intime, dir., trad. Jean Mistler, Paris, Grasset, 1985.)
Recent Comments