Shea, Christopher. "Against Intuition." CHRONICLE REVIEW October 3, 2008.

"If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can," the esteemed Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson told the Aristotelian Society, of London, a few years ago. That may sound like an innocuous truism: No one pictures Bertrand Russell doing his philosophical cogitation anywhere but in a club chair, or perhaps in bed, postcoitally (given his adventurousness in that arena). But, in fact, Williamson's remarks are fighting words these days, thanks to the rise of a cohort of philosophers who believe that the armchair arguments of philosophers need to be probed and tested through surveys of ordinary people and laboratory experiments using human subjects. If philosophers want to demonstrate that their arguments comport with how the mind really works, say the proponents of experimental philosophy, they need to get off their duffs. Does that sound like an incendiary charge? Indeed, an armchair in flames has become the informal symbol of the experimental-philosophy movement, also known as "x-phi." Online you can buy a burning-armchair T-shirt or watch a burning-armchair YouTube video, accompanied by the x-phi alt-rock anthem. The aggressive symbol is only partly tongue-in-cheek: some experimental philosophers believe they are simply augmenting and supplementing traditional philosophical work, but others view themselves as overturning a significant number of philosophical projects. They think they are calling into question methodologies that philosophers have made use of "for 2,400 years," as the Rutgers philosopher Stephen Stich, a pioneer of x-phi, puts it. Experimental philosophy has percolated on the edge of the discipline for several years, yet remains dogged by this question: Will it mature into a central, respected strand of philosophy or remain a semi-fringe endeavor, viewed from the mainstream as the kind of work that should be done (if at all) in psychology departments — with the results perhaps pondered later by "real" philosophers? . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=ymjzflppxc1tw7sv18k5fsvdw0yk8136.