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Later this week, hundreds of philosophers will converge near San Francisco's Union Square for the 87th annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.

Reporters from The San Francisco Chronicle will not be onsite to cover the invited symposia on the epistemology of modality or on the semantics and pragmatics of pejoratives. Local news stations will not record the sessions on Plato or on consciousness. The New York Times will not run a feature on the latest arguments concerning moral realism, reproduction and bioethics, war and global justice or the problem of animal pain.

Let's face it: philosophy rarely makes the news.

So it's all the more surprising that one small pocket of philosophy, known as "experimental philosophy," has, over the last few years, made it to the pages of Slate.com, The New York Times Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times' Opinionator and Room for Debate, Prospect Magazine, and yes, even NPR's Talk of the Nation.

What is experimental philosophy? And why this unprecedented public success?

Practitioners of experimental philosophy ("X-Philes") are a heterogeneous bunch, but most believe that there are important limitations to philosophy's dominant "armchair" methods of reflection and argumentation, prompting the adoption of a burning armchair as a logo (you can hear the accompanying anthem, sung by Alina Simone, on YouTube). To explore and remedy these limitations, they have turned to psychological research on people's judgments, feelings and behaviors. Some of them conduct this research themselves; others collaborate with social scientists or draw upon their work.