The PhilPapers Survey was a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views, carried out in November 2009. The Survey was taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students.
The PhilPapers Metasurvey was a concurrent survey of professional philosophers and others concerning their predictions of the results of the Survey. The Metasurvey was taken by 727 respondents including 438 professional philosophers and PhDs and 210 philosophy graduate students.
Angels finds the idea of the metasurvey - asking professional philosophers what they thought philosophers would think - irresistible. The comments and discussion pages are weird and wonderful. In these poll-ridden days, with their dull comments on the duller question of who can control the narrative on the outcome of the general election, predicting how many philosophers believe in a God, would you switch and let the train hit the singleton - and how bad an action is that?, political affiliation and the existence of an external world, overestimating and underestimating the proportion who agree with you ...serves the same function of feeding the inner anorak but ranges over everything, or almost everything that's thought of.
On the trolley/train switch, I want to know more about the people on the railway lines.
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I like this bit - buried in one of the information sheets, where they discuss how they got the list of philosophers for the question "which philosopher do you identify with most"
"The listed philosophers were largely based on Brian Leiter's polls concerning the "most important" philosophers in various historical eras.
We included the top 21 from the all-time list (down to Berkeley) and the remainder of the top 17 from the last-200-years list (down to Husserl and Heidegger).
Because the resulting list was all-male, we added Anscombe (the highest-ranked woman on the last-200-years list)"
I would love to know how many philosophers picked Anscombe...
I read Leiter's blog at first because he was reporting so well on the destruction that is going on at KCL, Botogol.
Then I got hooked on his links to all kinds of stuff in the philosophical world. The consideration of the possibility of zombies, their metaphysical status and the remarkably high returns for zombie-possibility is one of my favourites. Philosophers don't believe in God - but zombies, oh yes.
Yes, well after some introspection in 2006 I concluded that am, in fact, a philosophical zombie.
But only Mrs Botogol believes me.
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