The Big Questions of Philosophy

Exploring the kinds of problems that philosophy addresses, the way philosophy works and the distinction between philosophy and opinion.

Identifying the categories of fallacious reasoning; investigating examples of gut-thinking, confirmation bias, appealing to ignorance, the correlation fallacy, begging the question and equivocation; how to check one's reasoning for flaws.

Avoiding fallacious reasoning; studying the rules of deduction and induction; Aristotle's three axioms of logic; the difference between truth and validity; common mistakes in logical arguments; why practically all scientific arguments are inductive.

Exploring the power of abduction, a form of induction that is used not only by philosophers, but also by doctors to make medical diagnoses and scientists to construct theories; Sherlock Holmes, the master of deduction, practices abductive inference.

Exploring the question of what knowledge is; the problem of defining truth; investigating three philosophical theories that attempt to pin down this concept, which are pragmatism, coherentism and the correspondence theory.

Plato's thoughts on the pursuit of knowledge; Rene Descartes strengths and weaknesses of his position.