Exploring thought experiments

Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige and James Robert Brown invite us to treat this companion not as an “expert guide” but as an “enthusiastic fellow explorer,” who will accompany us through a territory populated by many different types of thought experiments that have in turn given rise to various approaches and theories. In order to facilitate this journey, they have divided the territory into four parts, which are, however, not separated by clear boundaries.

Part 1 (Chapters 1–7) presents the reader with a “selected history of thought experiments.” Part 2 (Chapters 8–14) discusses the use of thought experiments in different disciplinary fields, namely political philosophy, economics, ethics, modern physics, biology and mathematics. Part 3 (Chapters 15–19) offers a representative sample of contemporary philosophical approaches to thought experiments. And Part 4 (Chapters 20–31) which is the most heterogeneous, addresses some of the issues raised in the previous sections.

In the...