Real Essentialism

Hunter, Angela

GREEN

McLaren

Experimental philosophy is a new movement that seeks to return the discipline of philosophy to a focus on questions about how people actually think and feel. Departing from a long-standing tradition, experimental philosophers go out and conduct systematic <em>experiments</em> to reach a better understanding of people's ordinary intuitions about philosophically significant questions. Although the movement is only a few years old, it has already sparked an explosion of new research, challenging a number of cherished assumptions in both philosophy and cognitive science. <p/>The present volume provides an introduction to the major themes of work in experimental philosophy, bringing together some of the most influential articles in the field along with a collection of new papers that explore the theoretical significance of this new research.

Experimental Philosophy

<p>Plato and Aristotle were very much alive between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The essays in this volume investigate the interaction, both in terms of harmony and contrast, between the two philosophers in early modernity, that is in a time when long-forgotten texts became available and a new philological awareness was on the rise. Dealing with famous and less famous early modern interpreters and philosophers, in a transnational and translinguistic perspective, this volume reveals the agendas behind the discussions on Plato's and Aristotle's philosophies. In studying these texts, it is hard to imagine a more significant collision of big names with big ideas. This project takes us to the centre of the intellectual life of the period and its most exciting debates.</p>