How to Think like a Philosopher

In this course, Julian Baggini will extract the key lessons to be learned from the philosophers who have been specialists in sound thinking for millennia. In an age which fetishizes novelty and innovation, there is a need to relearn the greatest lessons from the past and appreciate that which is timeless is always timely. In addition to the technical nuts-and-bolts of reasoning, he will focus on the attitudes, habits, and character traits that make the difference between the clever and the wise. We’ll look at the many traps that await the would-be skilled reasoner and see why, like any tool, reasoning can be misapplied and misused, even with the best of intentions. And we won’t shy away from the sheer difficulty of thinking well. When sugar-coating goes too far, you end up with sickly confectionery and no nourishment. In our time-poor attention economy we are seduced by the promise of hacks, shortcuts, cognitive accelerators. But thinking reaches limits of efficiency very quickly and every corner cut comes at a cost. We need to hack off the hacks, not find more of them.