Subtitled 'Paradoxes, Puzzles and the Frailty of Knowledge', this is a profound and endlessly fascinating collection of philosophical experiments that leave the reader unable to settle back into old and lazy ways of thinking.
Philosophical experiments have shown, for example, that while most people feel sure that a 98-pound weakling can become a strongman, they also intuit that a black person can't become white, no matter what physical characteristics he changes.
Tetens' major work, Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung (1777; "Philosophical Experiments on Human Nature and Its Development"), shows the influence of Kant's Dissertation (1770).
So nitrous oxide went from philosophical experiments, to the seamy world of carnivals and fairgrounds, and then it was accepted as a great medical breakthrough.
"It's tempting to say that Dennett has never met a robot he didn't like, and that what he likes most about them is that they are philosophical experiments," Harry Blume wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1998.
He is impelled by a philosophical vision that suffuses his literary writings as much as his natural-philosophical experiments in colour theory and optics, botany and evolution.
This modern-day moral dilemma has its roots in a classic philosophical thought experiment known as the trolley problem.
The "trolley problem" is the name for a philosophical thought experiment created as an introduction to the moral distinction between action and inaction.
It generated enough interest that co-creators Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry were able to set up their studio, The Chinese Room (named after the philosophical thought experiment), as a commercial venture to develop a standalone version.
