But lots of philosophy is also conditional in character: if you accept commitments x, y, and z, then you should also accept commitment w -- or your position will be inconsistent or pragmatically incoherent or some such. And anyway, being conditional does not mean that mathematics has empirical content. It is not an empirical claim that the Pythagorean theorem follows from Euclid's axioms (or some suitable formalization of them). So, Larks' complaint still seems right to me: a field of inquiry need not have empirical content in order to have experts.