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Apr 29, 2025
Philosophical and Critical Thinking
Those familiar with some of my other writings will recognize that what I am here calling philosophical thinking is very close to what I have generally called strong sense critical thinking. The connection is not arbitrary. The ideal of strong sense critical thinking is implicit in the Socratic philosophical ideal of living a reflective life (and thus achieving command over one's mind and behavior). Instead of absorbing their philosophy from others, people can, with suitable encouragement and instruction, develop a critical and reflective attitude toward ideas and behavior. Their outlook and interpretations of themselves and others can be subjected to serious examination. Through this process, our beliefs become more our own than the product of our unconscious absorption of others' beliefs. Basic ideas such as “history,” “science,” “drama,” “mind,” “imagination,” and “knowledge” become organized by the criss-crossing paths of one's reflection. They cease to be compartmentalized subjects. The philosophical questions one raises about history cut across those raised about the human mind, science, knowledge, and imagination. Only deep philosophical questioning and honest criticism can protect us from the pronounced human tendency to think in a self-serving way. It is common to question only within a fundamentally unquestioned point of view. We naturally use our intellectual skills to defend and buttress those concepts, aims, and assumptions already deeply rooted in our thought.
The roots of thinking determine the nature, direction, and quality of that thinking. If teaching for thinking does not help students understand the roots of their thinking, it will fail to give them real command over their minds. They will simply make the transition from uncritical thought to weak sense . . .
Apr 15, 2025
The Skills and Processes of Thinking
Philosophers do not tend to approach the micro-skills and macro-processes of thinking from the same perspective as cognitive psychologists. Intellectual skills and processes are approached not from the perspective of the needs of empirical research but from the perspective of achieving personal, rational control. The philosophical is, as I have suggested, a person-centered approach to thinking. Thinking is always the thinking of some actual person, with some egocentric and sociocentric tendencies, with some particular traits of mind, engaged in the problems of a particular life. The need to understand one's own mind, thought, and action cannot be satisfied with information from empirical studies about aspects or dimensions of thought. The question foremost in the mind of the philosopher is not "How should I conceive of the various skills and processes of the human mind to be able to conduct empirical research on them?" but "How should I understand the elements of thinking to be able to analyze, assess, and rationally control my own thinking and accurately understand and assess the thinking of others?" Philosophers view thinking from the perspective of the needs of the thinker trying to achieve or move toward an intellectual and moral ideal of rationality and fairmindedness. The tools of intellectual analysis result from philosophy's 2,500 years of thinking and thinking about thinking.
Since thinking for one's self is a fundamental presupposed value for philosophy, the micro-skills philosophers use are intellectual moves that a reasoning person continually makes, independent of the subject matter of thought. Hence, whenever one is reasoning, one is reasoning about some issue or problem (and hence needs skills for analyzing and clarifying issues and problems). Likewise, whenever one is reasoning, one is reasoning from some point of view or within some conceptual framework (and hence needs skills for analyzing and clarifying interpretations or interpretive frameworks.) Finally, whenever one is reasoning, one is, in virtue of one's inferences, coming to some conclusions from some beliefs or premises which, in turn, are based on some assumptions. (The reasoner hence needs skills for analyzing, clarifying, and evaluating beliefs, judgments, inferences, implications, and assumptions.) For virtually any reasoning, one needs a variety of interrelated processes and skills.
Hence, from the philosophical point of view, the fundamental question is not whether one is solving problems or making decisions or engaging in scientific inquiry or forming concepts or comprehending or composing or arguing . . .
Apr 08, 2025
Mar 12, 2025
Values and Intellectual Traits [2 of 2]
Genuine intellectual development requires people to develop intellectual traits, traits acquired only by thinking one's way to basic philosophical insights. Philosophical thinking leads to insights which in turn shape basic skills of thought. Skills, values, insights, and intellectual traits are mutually and dynamically interrelated. It is the whole person who thinks, not some fragment of the person.
For example, intellectual empathy requires the ability to reconstruct accurately the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than one's own. But if one has not developed the philosophical insight that different people often think from divergent premises, assumptions, and ideas, one will never appreciate the need to entertain them. Reasoning from assumptions and ideas other than our own will seem absurd to us precisely to the degree that we are unable to step back philosophically and recognize that differences exist between people in their very frameworks for thinking.
Philosophical differences are common, even in the lives of small children. Children often reason from the assumption that their needs and desires are more important than anyone else's to the conclusion that they ought to get what they want in this or that circumstance. It often seems absurd to children that they are not given what they want. They are trapped in their egocentric viewpoints, see the world from within them, and unconsciously take their viewpoints (their philosophies, if you will) to define reality. To work out of this intellectual entrapment requires time and much reflection.
To develop consciousness of the limits of our understanding we must attain the courage to face our prejudices and ignorance. To discover our prejudices and ignorance in turn we often have to empathize with and reason within points of view toward which we are hostile. To achieve this end, we must persevere over an extended . . .
Mar 03, 2025
Values and Intellectual Traits [1 of 2]
Philosophical thinking, like all human thinking, is infused with values. But those who think philosophically make it a point to understand and assent to the values that underlie their thought. One thinks philosophically because one values coming to terms with the meaning and significance of one's life. If we do so sincerely and well, we recognize problems that challenge us to decide the kind of person we want to make ourselves, including deciding the kind of mind we want to have. We have to make a variety of value judgments about ourselves regarding, among other things, fears, conflicts, and prejudices. This requires us to come to terms with the traits of mind we are developing. For example, to be truly open to knowledge, one must become intellectually humble. But intellectual humility is connected with other traits, such as intellectual courage, intellectual integrity, intellectual perseverance, intellectual empathy, and fairmindedness. The intellectual traits characteristic of our thinking become for the philosophical thinker a matter of personal concern. Philosophical reflection heightens this concern.
Consider this excerpt from a letter from a teacher with a master’s degree in physics and mathematics:
After I started teaching, I realized that I had learned physics by rote and that I really did not understand all I knew about physics. My thinking students asked me questions for which I always had the standard textbook answers, but for the first time made me start thinking for myself, and I realized that these canned answers were not justified by my own thinking and only confused my students who were showing some ability to think for themselves. To achieve my academic goals I had memorized the thoughts of others, but I had never learned or been encouraged to learn to think for myself.
This is a good example of. . .
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Feb 04, 2025
Post-Transcript Analysis and Discussion [3 of 3]
All subjects, in sum, can be taught philosophically or unphilosophically. Let me illustrate by using the subject of history. Since philosophical thinking tends to make our most basic ideas and assumptions explicit, by using it we can better orient ourselves toward the subject as a whole and mindfully integrate the parts into the whole.
Students are introduced to history early in their education, and that subject area is usually required through high school and into college, and with good reason. But the unphilosophical way history is often taught fails to develop students' ability to think historically for themselves. Indeed, history books basically tell students what to believe and what to think about history. Students have little reason in most history classes to relate the material to the framework of their own ideas, assumptions, or values. Students do not know that they have a philosophy, and even if they did, it is doubtful that without the stimulation of a teacher who approached the subject philosophically they would see the relevance of history to it.
But consider the probable outcome of teachers raising and facilitating discussion questions such as the following . . .
Jan 13, 2025
Post-Transcript Analysis and Discussion [2 of 4]
When teachers approach their subjects philosophically, they make it much easier for students to begin to integrate their thinking across subject matter divisions. In the preceding discussion, for example, the issues considered involved personal experience, psychology, sociology, ethics, culture, and philosophy.
The issues, philosophically put, made these diverse areas relevant to each other. And just as one might inquire into a variety of issues by first asking a basic philosophical question, so one might proceed in the other direction: first asking a question within a subject area and then, by approaching it philosophically, [exploring] its relationships to other subjects. These kinds of transitions are quite natural and unforced in a philosophical discussion, because all dimensions of human study and experience are indeed related to each other. We would see this if we could set aside the blinders that usually come with conventional discipline-specific instruction. By routinely considering root questions and root ideas philosophically, we naturally pursue those connections freed of these blinders.
As teachers teaching philosophically, we are continually interested in what the students themselves think on basic matters and issues. We continually encourage students to explore how what they think about X relates to what they think about Y and Z. This necessarily requires that students' thought moves back and forth between their own basic ideas and those presented in class by other students, between their own ideas and those expressed in a book, between their thinking and their experiences, between ideas within one domain and those in another.
This dialogical process (moving back and forth between divergent domains and points of view) will sometimes become dialectical (some ideas will clash or be inconsistent with others). The act of integrating thinking is deeply tied to the act of assessing thinking, because, as we consider a diversity of ideas, we discover that many of them contradict . . .
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