Gli esperimenti mentali in filosofia e in metafisica. Fra criticismo kantiano e filosofia sperimentale

In this paper, starting with a historical reconstruction of Kant’s concept of the «experiments of pure reason», I have attempted to outline a theory of thought experiments in philosophy (and metaphysics) that is, in a broad sense, neo-Kantian and experimentalist at the same time. Kant’s idea of the a priori, if understood in a coherently functional manner, allows the thesis of a principled difference between scientific and philosophical thought experiments to be reconciled with the assumption of a methodological naturalism that admits of no difference between the particular methods of science and philosophy. The conception defended here of thought experiments in philosophy can be summarised as follows: 1) philosophical thought experiments are exemplifications of counterfactual reasoning that are expressions of the same unlimited critique that characterises philosophy; 2) as far as their content is concerned, they depend entirely on information from ‘outside’, i.e. from common sense and the empirical sciences, and it is this content that, with respect to the conditions of possibility of its existence for us, underlies the criterion of its internal coherence; 3) apart from the reversal of the direction of enquiry, there is no difference in principle between the methods of reasoning adopted in scientific thought experiments and philosophical thought experiments (any such difference could only be based on a material conception of the a priori).