The Philosopher's Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room

Thinking is fundamental to our daily lives, and this introduction surveys the philosopher’s toolkit and strategies to improve our thinking—visualization, simplification, the principles of debate, and techniques for social reasoning. Because the best philosophy is done in conjunction with other disciplines, you’ll apply these tools to economics, psychology, and more.

Which is a better tool for decision making, reason or emotion? As this lecture argues, both cool rationality and hot emotion have their place. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each can help us make better decisions, both in the heat of a moment and during long-term analysis.

Pull out your pen and paper and put “conceptual visualization” to work. Humans excel at pattern recognition, and what we see in our mind’s eye can aid us in solving even the most daunting of puzzles, from the Pythagorean theorem to Special Relativity. You’ll see how sketches and matrices are powerful aids for information management.

Explore the most basic elements of thought to prepare for the coming lectures. Concepts are the atoms of thought, expressed by words and illustrated by Venn diagrams and concept trees. Words form sentences—or propositions—which are the molecules of thought. Together, concepts and propositions provide a structural framework to express thought and convey information.

So far, the course has emphasized visual techniques for logical thinking. In this lecture you’ll discover one of the greatest developments of human thought. Aristotle’s “square of oppositions” is the core of our logical system and provides a bridge to connect visualization with the flow of rational argument.