
ESSAYS
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More...In this essay I present a critical review of the current debate between partisans of two, on the face of it sharply conflicting present-day movements of thought. On the one hand are ranged the thought-experimentalists, or those who uphold some version of the ‹armchair› philosopher’s traditional appeal to truths of reason or a priori grounds of knowledge. On the other are found their more empirically-minded opponents who urge that we abandon such delusory ideas and instead practise a very different form of ‹experimental philosophy›. This latter is conceived very much on the model of the social sciences and involves a survey of opinion on various topics conducted across a sample group of respondents including, though by no means restricted to, the community of expert or specialist philosophers.
More...It might seem strange to begin by defining the main goal of our text negatively, but we believe it is a possible or even suitable approach. The reason for this lies in the very concept of totalitarianism: a topic which has already been dissected, viewed from multiple vantage points, discussed, treated and summarised so many times before.
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