Major founded a discipline for arranging collections, "the Taxis of Chambers." Taxis was a military term for the strategic mobile arrangements of troops and supplies. Major understood all forms of order, from nature to society, as a form of taxis. In order to advance knowledge of these other forms of order, collections needed to be remade into dynamic repositories that both supplied materials for investigating taxis and themselves could be rearrangeable as knowledge of other orders shifted. To effect this redesign, Major surveyed practices of collecting around the world in a vernacular serial. He built a broad tent for museology while integrating knowledge from a public in ways that often undermined the authority of their views. Curators ought to be experimental philosophers, he maintained. He chided those who did not appreciate order, rather than monetary value, as the most precious part of a collection. He designed shelving, signage, and cataloging to make the museum into a tool of knowledge change. Through experimentation in the collection and discussions in the conference hall, he sought to transform the collection from a site that stupefied to one that awakened awareness.

Experimental philosophy was institutionalized as a discipline in Central Europe with the first seminars and professorships. Major requested but did not receive a professorship in this discipline, yet he taught one of its first seminars. At the beginning of each meeting, Major lectured on experimental norms, but then spent most time experimenting upon objects in his collection in a purposefully nonmethodical way. The seminar integrated current research by Major and his students. Whirling from one experiment to the next, Major dramatized shifting, probabilistic knowledge and tried to lure students away from a priori systems. He often deployed phenomena from global craft or even street performances, but he distinguished experimental philosophy as a liberal discipline from its application to use. Major’s son-in-law, Wilhelm Ulrich Waldschmidt, became the first chair of experimental philosophy in Kiel in 1693. He taught many of the same experiments as Major, but, like others of his generation, he rearranged them to lend experimental philosophy a much more methodical air. A pedagogical presentation of experimental method developed distinct from the practice of experimental research.