“But is this actually philosophy?” Ethan Landes (Eindhoven University of Technology) is tired of experimental philosophers being asked The Question. And he’s tired of experimental philosophers “appeasing” those who ask it by “dressing up experimental scholarship up as relevant to armchair analytic philosophy.” He writes: Every experimental philosopher has tons of practice doing this. It is how we answer The Question in Q&As. It is how we write grant applications. It is how we pitch ourselves in cover letters for jobs: “Oh sure, if you hire me, I will be conducting empirical research, but actually this is super important to existing debates in philosophy because x, y, and z”. This is the strategy experimental philosophers advise each other to use. It is the strategy I advise others to use. This sort of appeasement is, by and large, what we see in the academic literature on experimental philosophy. Arguments for experimental philosophy, whether friendly or unfriendly for the armchair, have, in one way or another, positioned themselves as being in service of academic philosophy’s status quo. The stated goal is always improvement upon existing questions and not the creation of something fundamentally new. He thinks it’s time for a change. His preferred answer to The Question is: “Of course we are doing philosophy. We are just not doing philosophy in their way. Not in the analytic way.” What if we as experimental philosophers stopped playing this game? What if we pitched experimental philosophy as something historically connected with analytic philosophy but not metaphilosophically connected to it? As its own philosophy with its own methods and its own questions? As a tradition of philosophy as legitimate of an heir to Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, and Quine as analytic philosophy? For a lot of us, this would certainly be more truthful than how we currently pitch our work. Experimental philosophy is by no means a unified field, but a lot of its members, myself among them, just do not care about or believe in the specific problems and specific questions analytic philosophy is working on. Sure, we can pitch our research as applying to those debates. God knows I could monologue off the cuff for an hour about why my experimental research actually matters to..

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