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It is a common assumption that philosophical thought experiments are structurally identical. Contrary to this assumption, I show that at least two types of thought experiments exist. Descartes’s “piece of wax” and Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat” thought experiments, for instance, are performative proofs that consist in exercising the imagination to justify a claim about the imagination. Searle’s “Chinese room” and Davidson’s “swampman” thought experiments, for example, evaluate theories by comparing whether two entities, of which one is a mundane entity and the other constructed according to ontological assumptions entailed by the tested theory, are identical. I further differentiate these two types of thought experiments from the method of cases, compare them to other thought experiment types, such as Chalmers’s “zombie” case, and evaluate whether they are continuous with scientific thought experiments, as is commonly claimed.

Analytic philosophy possesses a dominance in academia that has forced phenomenology into retreat. Part of this dominance is justified by the claim that analytic methods exhibit more clarity than those of phenomenology. This paper is an attempt to challenge this claim on metaphilosophical grounds. I argue that versions of analytic philosophy that rely on the method of cases rest on philosophically non-innocent presuppositions and that analytic philosophy does not possess methods to identify these presuppositions or justify them easily against the backdrop of description or coherence within a system. I demonstrate these points by comparing the metaphilosophical frameworks developed by Williamson, Cappelen and Deutsch with the metaphilosophical framework developed by Heidegger, that does not possess the same metaphilosophical shortcomings which its analytic competitors exhibit. Concretely, phenomenological metaphilosophical frameworks that also include hermeneutics in the sense of a genealogical presupposition analysis, possess more clarity than analytic frameworks that obscure presupposition dependencies.

In this paper we refute the popular metaphilosophical claim, defended by Stemplowska, Valentini and List, that some counterfactuals that ideal theorists use as assumptions are scientific idealizations, i.e., generally warranted methodological devices that are regularly used in the natural sciences. First, we argue that this claim rests on a vague and potentially misleading use of the term ‘idealization’. Secondly, referring to research in philosophy of science, we show a) that scientific and ideal theories do not share relevant common properties and, b) that ideal theoretic ‘idealizations’ do not share relevant functional roles and justification criteria with scientific idealizations. To the contrary, ideal theoretic ‘idealizations’ and scientific idealizations often turn out to be functional and epistemic opposites. We conclude the paper with a discussion of three concerns about the metaphilosophical research on ideal theory and idealizations that pertain to method, ontology and ideology.