EBOOK Philosophy without Intuitions

The claim that contemporary analytic philosophers rely extensively on intuitions        as evidence is almost universally accepted in current meta-philosophical debates and        it figures prominently in our self-understanding as analytic philosophers. No matter        what area you happen to work in and what views you happen to hold in those areas,        you are likely to think that philosophizing requires constructing cases and making        intuitive judgments about those cases. This assumption also underlinesthe entire        experimental philosophy movement: only if philosophers rely on intuitions as        evidence are data about non-philosophers' intuitions of any interest to us. Our        alleged reliance on the intuitive makes many philosophers who don't work on        meta-philosophy concerned about their own discipline:they are unsure what intuitions        are and whether they can carry the evidential weight we allegedly assign to them.The        goal of this book is to argue that this concern is unwarranted since the claim is        false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively (or even a little bit) on        intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in        somewhat irresponsible use of 'intuition'-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility        has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled        meta-philosophers: it has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and        misleadingpictures of what philosophy is.