The Philosopher's Toolkit

[Lians]

Every once in a while, I like to take on the daunting task of revising my mental toolkit. Due to the scope of my work, ranging from art to science, this toolkit inevitably grows large and unwieldy as I'm using it. I value nimbleness, and I have to carefully organize and improve my selection of tools, deriving powerful generic tools and throwing away the ones I find useless.

 

As you can imagine, this is a difficult and head-scratch inducing process. In my quest for insight, I stumbled across an online course called The Philosopher’s Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room. I scoffed at the title, but I decided to take a closer look before passing judgement. The selection of topics seemed quite interesting and so I bought it.

 

I'm only a third of the way through and the material is fantastic. I'd usually complete the whole course before recommending it, but there's a 72% holiday discount and I wanted to save you some money.

 

So far, I haven't learned any new techniques, but I really enjoy the empirical evidence that is provided alongside proposed methodologies. The scientific research and real-life examples really help me discern the value of my own mental tools.

 

The course material draws on insight from philosophy, psychology, physics, mathematics and various other disciplines. It took me many years and a lot of hard work to synthesize the information that is so readily presented in this course. I really wish my parents had given me these tools when I was younger. They could have saved me all those years in which I wandered around blindly, consuming random pieces of information with the hope of finding some wisdom in them. 

 

If you never bothered going deeper into applied philosophy or have a young philosopher at home, this course is for you! As an adult, you can save yourself the effort of going through a lot of thick and poorly written books. More importantly, you can easily use the presented methodologies as a foundation for your child's lifelong learning. I'll definitely be saving a copy for when I become a dad. The information is organized and presented with great care. You'll miss out on a lot if you only get the audio version.

[Lians]

Half-way through now! To me, the lecture on heuristics alone is worth the price of the course. I had so many AH-HA! moments. I've always instinctively relied on, and even created my own reasoning heuristics, calling them shortcuts. Now that I was introduced to them more formally, I can improve their efficiency tremendously. This is the one new tool that I got out of the course so far.

 

Additional highlights:

• Use reason and emotions together, they're both useful! (I was surprised a professor of philosophy advocated this position!)
• Aristotelian logic.
• Difference between true and valid arguments.
• Learn how to parse arguments.
• Diffuse polarized arguments through, wait for it, negotiation!

 

I was expecting a lot more rigid and dry topics, but I'm quite pleased with the range of information that is presented. If you combine this course with some lessons on grammar, you'll have yourself a Trivium - the famed education approach that a lot of unschoolers advocate. There's not a whole lot of debt to particular topics, but you can always supplement them with the internet, books and FDR material. Who said education was expensive?

 

I don't expect to get much out of the other lectures since I already know the maths behind them. I'll update this thread with some additional information and my final thoughts after I finish the course.

[dsayers]

Added to my "to-read" list and placed at the top. Thank you for the excellent review and suggestion.