Philosophers often use short, imaginary cases in their argumentation: thought experiments. The seminar examines this philosophical method through three central questions: What are thought experiments? What can we learn from them? And how can they be used for doing and teaching philosophy? To address these questions, we will study well-known thought experiments from epistemology, ethics, and physics, discuss competing accounts of how thought experiments work, and examine examples of how they can be used in teaching philosophy.

Important information

The seminar will be conducted entirely in English, including class discussions, readings, and all written assignments.

Active participation is required to pass the course.This includes completing the assigned readings, submitting the required written assignments, and writing a final short paper.Students who do not attend classes regularly will be assigned additional readings and written work in order to meet the course requirements.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the seminar, students will be able to:

•     demonstrate familiarity with the contemporary debate on thought experiments;

•     situate these debates within broader philosophical contexts;

•     compare the role of thought experiments across philosophy and the sciences;

•     critically analyze and evaluate thought experiments in both oral and written form;

•     demonstrate familiarity with the use of thought experiments as pedagogical tools for teaching philosophy.

Content

The seminar will cover the following topics and questions:

•     What is a thought experiment?

•     Why should we care about thought experiments?

•     Thought experiments in science and philosophy

•     How and what can we learn from thought experiments?

•     The problem of informativeness

•     The Intuition account and its challenges (experimental philosophy)

•     The argument view and its challenges

•     The problem of deviant realizations

•     How to use thought experiments?

•     The heuristic function of thought experiments and alethic refuters

•     Thought experiments as a pedagogical tool

•     Philosophy for children

Selected Bibliography:

• Brown, James Robert. 1991. "Thought Experiments: A Platonic Account." Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophiy, 119-28. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Deutsch, Max 2015. The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, A Bradford Book.
• Gendler 1998 Galileo and the Indispensability of Scientific Thought Experiment https://doi.org/10.2307/3326922
• Knobe, Joshua and Shaun Nichols, "Experimental Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/experimental-philosophy
• Norton, John D. 2004 "On Thought Experiments: Is there More to the Argument? Philosophy of Science 71 (5): 1139-51 https://doi.org/10.1086/425238
• Sorensen, ROy A. 1992. Thought Experiments. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Stuart, Michael T. ; Fehige, Yiftach & Brown, James Robert (eds.) (2018). The Routledge Companion to THought Experiments. London: Routledge
• Thomson, J.J. (1985). The Trolley Problem. The Yale Law Journal, 94 (6), 1395-1415. https://doi.org/10.2307/796133
• Steglich-Petersen, Abjørn & Praëm, Sara Kier (2015). Philosophical thought experiments as heuristics for theory discovery. Synthese 192 (9):2827-2842.
• Weinberg, J.M., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2001). Normativity and epistemic intuitions. Philosophical Topics, 29, 429-460.
• Williamson, TImothy. 2007. The Philosophy of Philosophy. The Blackwell/Brown Lectures in Philosophy 2. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.