many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do. Throughout history, philosophers have written on some of the universe's biggest questions: how to cope with suffering, what makes for a good life, how do we tell what is true from what is false. But alongside these, they have tackled another issue: how can we learn to be good philosophers? Because whether you think philosophy itself is a waste of time or one of life's greatest pleasures, we could all stand to learn a thing or two from some of the greatest thinkers in history. Today, we shall look at what some phenomenal minds had to say about the subject of thinking and how their insights are painfully applicable to the modern day. Get ready to learn the true meaning of precision, why doubt is your greatest friend, and why philosophers should ask questions without fear. As always, bear in mind that I'm only giving incomplete representations of the views of the thinkers I'm going to talk about, and I highly encourage you to look into the details of their thoughts as well.

first let's tackle one of the oldest themes in philosophy and perhaps one of its most important one. Let's get specific. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates spends a lot of time talking about definitions, and this is for good reason. He is acutely aware of just how confusing thinking and talking about complex topics can get, and he also knows the antidote to all of this bafflement: the careful application of specificity. A whole suway of logical errors can take place if we are not as precise as possible with both our definitions and the structure of our thought. For instance, imagine that you and I are having a conversation about the problem of evil, the idea that the existence of evil in the world is evidence against an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving God. However, unbeknownst to you, I am merely talking about The Logical Problem of Evil, the idea that evil is logically incompatible with God, whereas you are talking about the evidential problem of evil, the idea that evil makes the existence of God less credible.

might seem like a subtle distinction, and to a certain extent, it is, but it could derail our entire discussion. For example, I might say, Well, maybe God has a higher plan that involves our suffering. This is a perfectly adequate response if all we are looking at is logical inconsistency because this is a logical possibility, and so it is sufficient to prove bare consistency. However, it's a pretty weak response to the evidential problem of evil. You might quite rightly respond with, Yeah, but how likely is it that God's plan involves the suffering and death of so many creatures? If I'm just talking about logical consistency, then this objection is irrelevant since it's now in the realm of probability or plausibility. But if we are talking about evidence, then it is a totally fair response, hence the importance of specifying the problem we are discussing at the outset. And this is just one example of the kind of confusion that can arise when we are not putting in the effort to speak or think in precise terms, and this crops up all the time in

contemporary debates disagreements about what constitutes valuable human life drift into debates about euthanasia often without anyone acknowledging that the difference in definitions make further dialogue here much more difficult. The lack of specificity leads to profound confusion or to take an example from the history of philosophy Jeremy benam argued that what all humans ultimately desire is pleasure but because of a confusion over what exactly he meant by the term pleasure many people interpreted him as promoting a hedonistic lifestyle one which involved constant intoxication and sexual excess almost exactly the same misinterpretation is often applied to epicurus and all because of a lack of precision in definitions. This emphasis on specificity in philosophy would reach a fever pitch in the early 20th century when philosophers such as AJ a carap and the young Vicken Stein would propose strict constraints on what could be talked about with an acceptable level of precision and said that we must remain silent on everything else. Many of these thinkers argued that unless we break down a statement into exactly what

observations or logical definitions. It corresponds to. We cannot really talk about it in specific enough terms to warrant true philosophical inquiry. In other words, they strove for complete specificity for various reasons. Most people reject this early 20th-century style of thinking, but that does not mean that the spirit of their ideas had no insight in it. Ultimately, the gold standard for precision would be something like mathematical or philosophical logic. This is where we use specially designed symbols to express the specific meaning of our statements, elucidating the logical relations and consequences of our propositions. But in almost all cases, we don't need to go this far. For me, the most impactful everyday usage for this sort of philosophical precision is to become as specific as possible about the definitions that we are using in our own thoughts and discussions. Many of us are busy or overworked people, so it's very easy for us to fall into using vague concepts that we've not fully investigated. We start describing things as good or bad or idiotic without

knowing what we really mean by these terms, we can get into the habit of generalizing claims automatically or reasoning with heuristics without even realizing that's what we're doing. And this means we can't even get a clear picture of what we think about an issue. Additionally, we often assume that everyone else is using the exact same definitions we are, but this is almost certainly not the case. And if we don't recognize this, we can waste hours having unproductive arguments with people we don't even necessarily disagree with. For such varied thinkers as Plato, Spinosa, and Liit, this specificity of thought is an essential element in our philosophical training. Not only will it help us avoid errors in our own ideas, but it will slowly hone our logical reasoning ability. We will habitually ask not just what we believe, but also the reasons we believe it, and over time we will learn to spell out exactly what we think to such an extreme degree of precision that there will be very little room for confusion or error on the part.

of our listener. Not only will this help with our understanding of other people, but it will also put us in touch with the flaws in our own thinking, and we shall become intimately acquainted with where our own reasoning has a tendency to go off the rails. A lack of precision can hide a multitude of logical sins, but this is only the start. Next, we shall look at the advice of one Arthur Schopenhauer on what he thinks separates a skilled thinker from the rest. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider subscribing to my Channel or my Patreon. The links are in the description. Two, originality and creativity. Arthur Schopenhauer is famous for his pical essays against anything and everything that bothered him or struck him as irksome. This stretches from his rage against rhetoric in his ironically titled The Art of Being Right to his essay on being happy, which argues that the world fundamentally consists of frustration and suffering. But amongst all of these complaints, there was also something that he found deeply upsetting about the writers and thinkers of his.

day. They struck him as both careless and unoriginal. Schopenhauer divides up the world of literature and philosophy into two kinds of writers. The first is someone who just writes for the sake of money or acclaim. They are not particularly interested in the content of what they are writing but are instead just cashing in a check. Much of the writings around entertainment fall into this category, but it also includes a huge number of news articles and opinion pieces. But for Schopenhauer, philosophers are meant to write for the sake of their subject. In other words, they write because they have something to say and hopefully that also contains some original thought. This might simply be a spin on a previous doctrine, such as Schopenhauer's own interpretations of Eastern philosophy, but importantly they are writing with thought, care, and attention. He also criticizes people who set off writing without carefully planning what they're going to say. For him, such thinkers inevitably end up confused and will produce nothing particularly worth reading. He also warns any young authors or philosophers against falling fully in line with

whatever the most popular or acclaimed view on a subject is, and instead challenge accepted dogma at least occasionally. This is not just knee-jerk contrarianism, but reflects something really quite helpful. It is often by questioning the most common approaches to a subject that we stumble upon something genuinely new, and while novelty itself might not be a virtue, at the very least we would be adding something to the corpus of human thought. This fear about slapdash and non-committal thinking and writing is echoed by one of Schopenhauer's contemporaries, Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was very worried by philosophers and thinkers not taking their questions truly seriously, and he saw this as an increasing trend in 19th-century Denmark. For him, philosophy was not just a matter of toying with ideas, but of committing to them and developing them yourselves. It is often only in the process of deciding to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion that we can get at the nuances of our individual thoughts, or to use Schopenhauer's language, to think for

the sake of the subject and adding something original to it, rather than merely for our own amusement. Kard also shared Schopenhauer's concerns about becoming too uncreative in our own philosophies. He pointed out that the most popular ideas of any given time period are not necessarily the best, and that many people are drawn to their views of the world not through careful consideration, reason, or even faith, but instead from a desire to fit in with the crowd. For him, it is the work of the philosopher to break free of this understandable pull towards mere societal acceptance, and instead to pursue their ideas wherever they might lead. He does accept that this is sometimes a dangerous thing to do; going against the popular grain in any situation is pretty difficult and can come with a fair amount of social rejection and condemnation. Nonetheless, for Kard, the philosopher must persevere, remembering that Socrates was killed for doing exactly the same thing. But this is one of the very reasons we respect him so much, and it is worth noting that

throughout the history of philosophy, the thinkers that we venerate and admire also tend to have been creative and original. In some cases, almost to excess. To take just one example, today almost no one follows Plato's ideas to the letter. His metaphysics is pretty unpopular, and his political philosophy is often just considered a fun historical artifact. But such was his creativity, diligence, and originality that he is still one of the most respected figures in the history of philosophy today, despite people disagreeing with the particularities of his views over 2,000 years later. Alfred North Whitehead still described the whole of Western philosophy as a footnote to Plato. And it is these truly original ideas that have had the most impact on philosophy as a whole. In his postumus notebooks, the philosopher Ludwig Vicken Stein propounded a whole new theory of language and meaning that we are still getting to grips with today. If its depths were explored and widely understood, it could teach us how to understand one another better, how to

have constructive conversations and interpret discourse effectively. Aristotle's metaphysical system spawned an immensely successful view of science that was only surpassed during the Enlightenment. Such original thinkers would encourage us to occasionally go out on a limb, explore an idea that at first seems unintuitive and crazy, and just see where it leads. This is not an invocation to abandon critical thinking, far from it, but it is sometimes in the gaps between already existing ideas that true innovation can be found, and sometimes looking in the most unlikely places can lead to the strangest of philosophical breakthroughs. It is said that Vicken Stein's earlier theory of language was inspired by his reflections on a court proceeding, and his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus shaped philosophy, linguistics, and more for 30 years after its publication. And the great thing about this blue sky philosophical thinking is that you can start almost anywhere if you look for it. I've got a sneaky feeling that you'll find philosophy actually is all around. But next, we shall look at some old favorites.

of the channel and what they have to say about questioning and fear. Three courage and inquiry. There is a passage in Friedrich N's Twilight of the Idols where he launches a diatribe of criticism against what he called system Builders. Amongst these people, he included a great many theologians but also straightforward philosophers like K or Hegel who would develop their ideas through building elaborate and complex systems to explain our world and how it should be. But what exactly was N's problem here? It certainly wasn't that he shied away from complex or unintuitive ideas. He has a fair few of them himself, but he thought that in building these systems, these thinkers had compromised a far more important principle of philosophy: the ability to question anything without fear. And this is arguably N's most distinctive trait as a philosopher. He truly did not care about slaying sacred Dogma or making half of AC IIA angry at him. He just kept questioning, kept writing, and ended up producing some of the best-known philosophy in history. He interrogated

the idea held up as a paragon of ethical philosophy for thousands of years: that reason will lead to virtue, which will lead to happiness. And he refused to accept that what made us human was our rationality. He rejected the objective value of compassion or pity and embraced a radically new type of thinking that proposed we humans could create our own values. All of this could only be accomplished because he refused to take anything as unquestionable and would interrogate the very fundaments of metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. For nature, nothing was off limits for his questioning, and this is what allowed him to write what he did and think in the manner he did. We may not agree with it, but there is no denying its influence. It arguably changed the face of philosophy forever. As another example, take Albert Camus: his philosophy of absurdism is perhaps one of the most famous ideas in the world today, but it is also striking because it fearlessly questioned the fundamental assumptions of existential

philosophy before him people have been so focused on creating meaning and solving nihilism, that they had lost sight of another option to move past the need for a meaning of life altogether, and to make peace with the valuelessness of our world. And this bold questioning was not just incidental to his approach; he saw it as a supreme tenant of philosophical thinking. In the myth of Copus, kamu talks about philosophical suicide. This is a very dramatic name for something we have all probably come across at some point. It is when someone who previously valued truth and reasoned inquiry suddenly cannot bear the results of their own logic, and instead of looking their conclusions in the face, runs away from them as fast as humanly possible. He viewed kard as just such a thinker, since in the face of doubts about the existence of God, he found them so unbearable that he decided to plunge wholeheartedly into his faith, and he rejected his reasons for doubting, not by arguing against them, but by providing a countervailing emotional.

Force for kamu, this was essentially abandoning philosophy and tant amounts to killing that aspect of us that is interested in asking questions without fear of what the answers may be. However, I want to add a Counterpoint to kamu and N here because, as I said in the previous section, sometimes ideas can only develop if we temporarily take some aspects of them as accepted and then see what their consequences are. The philosopher of science Thomas [__] once spoke of two phases of scientific inquiry: the normal stage and the Revolutionary stage. The normal stage is where we develop a particular set of assumptions as far as we possibly can to explain any new phenomena that we encounter. So, over the course of the 19th century, we might attempt to use Newtonian mechanics to explain literally every physical observation. But then, eventually, we come up against something we just cannot make sense of, and that is when we revisit our starting assumptions and have a scientific revolution; hence the need for Einstein's science theories of both special and general relativity.

something most people skim over is that [ __ ]. Thought both of these phases were incredibly important. If we never spent all that time working under the assumption that Newtonian mechanics could explain every observation, then a myriad of advances in the physics of medium-sized objects, as well as in engineering, would have been totally missed. Paradoxically, if we were to have a scientific revolution every few years, then we would probably make far fewer helpful scientific advances. In order to do almost anything, we have to make certain assumptions, and we might apply a similar train of thought to philosophy. It is true that revolutionary philosophers are fun to look at, and we certainly have much to learn from them, but sometimes it is just as valuable to assume a starting premise and work out what the consequences of this would be. For example, much of the development of virtue ethics by medieval Christian thinkers was working under the assumption that we were made in the image of God, but their writings are still immensely helpful for someone who

wants to make sense of the philosophical notion of virtue today. Even if they reject the theistic premise, the idea of a non-physical Soul has gone out of fashion for many of us. But the idea that our mind is divided into an repetitive part and a cognitive or rational part is still an underlying assumption in some Modern therapy techniques. One example of this would be cognitive behavioral therapy, which posits a connection between patterns of thought and emotions. And if you crack open a CBT textbook, you will find that they are implicitly working with this multi-part structure of the Mind. So I think we can take two distinct lessons away here. The first is that sometimes it is genuinely worth going back to the drawing board and resetting our philosophical assumptions. Occasionally there is very little baby for a whole heap of bathat. But secondly, we should not discount the value of philosophy that is conducted on uncertain first premises. Who knows, we might even discover that our findings are helpful even if we later reject the initial starting point. But finally, I

want to examine a theme that runs through the entire history of Western philosophy, and it is something we could use a whole lot more of today: doubt and dubit ability. The term skeptic stretches right back to ancient Greece, and it's a little bit different to how we consider Skeptics today, people like Richard Dawkins. Now, we associate skepticism with scientists and critical thinking, but in ancient Athens, the fundamental building block of the skeptical worldview was doubt. They would doubt almost everything, from their perceptions to their deductions to their judgments, in the hope of attaining ataraxia, a blissful awareness of their own profound ignorance of literally everything. And while as a way of life this has understandably fallen out of favor, the Skeptics were onto one very important thing: the philosopher is fundamentally a doubter. This rich tradition is perhaps best exemplified in Descartes' Meditations, where he sets out to doubt everything he possibly can in order to rebuild his knowledge on firmer foundations. This is where we get his

famous kogito argument or I think therefore I am. Because that was the first thing he thought he could be absolutely certain of. According to dayart, an essential part of a philosophical life is to, at least once in our lives, sit down and truly try to doubt everything we think we know. This doubt should stretch to our views about reality, about inquiry, about life, about ourselves, about our relationships, and so much more. For dayart, it seems like the mark of philosophy is never being satisfied with resting on our epistemic Laurels. Instead, we must be constantly doubting and revising our beliefs in light of new evidence, new arguments, and new ideas. Later, the empiricist David Hume would similarly paint doubt as a Cornerstone of healthy philosophical thinking. Perhaps his most famous quotation is, A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. And contained within this worldview is the idea that we should be holding our judgments at a distance, both from ourselves and our identities. It is not that we shouldn't

be passionate about our opinions. Hume certainly was, but we should never become so attached to them that we would be unwilling to let go of them if new evidence came to light. This idea is littered throughout Hume's philosophy as he doubted so many of the so-called received truths of his day, from disbelieving in God to holding that reason was a slave of the passions. Hume threw doubt on the very foundations of philosophy as it existed in the 18th century. Despite popular belief, this sort of doubt is also very much evidenced in faith-based philosophy. One of the reasons I'm such a fan of Thomas Aquinas is because he was not satisfied with taking the existence of God on faith or even on revelation. He wanted to prove His existence through the use of natural reason, that is, careful and logical philosophical argumentation. Sure, I am an atheist, so I disagree with his conclusions, but this dissatisfaction with unreasoned belief is part of what makes Aquinas such an influential and

exceptional thinker, and he is firmly rooted in this philosophical tradition of doubt. In more modern times, Bertrand Russell has argued that doubt is an essential component not just of a good philosopher but of a functioning society. Towards his later years, Russell became increasingly concerned with how humanity was to ever solve disagreements without recourse to violence. He was totally shaken by the First and Second World Wars, as well as the ongoing Cold War, and wanted to know why people were so keen to turn to force to resolve disputes. Of course, there are many factors here: self-interest, the efficiency of physical might, and much more, but he also saw that if people held their opinions without any doubt, then it becomes impossible to change their minds through any other means than sheer power. For instance, imagine that I'm having a discussion with someone who thinks that killing puppies for fun is a good thing. They think it is moral, and they plan to do more of it. If they have some doubt in this belief, then there is hope. I can

give them reasons for changing their mind. I might appeal to a utilitarian position, or reach out to their inner C. Doubt becomes the crack through which reason can pour through, but if they are totally certain, such that nothing, even in principle, could change their mind, then I am all out of options. Now, I either have to let them go on killing puppies or try to intervene through force. Thus, for Russell, with total certainty, the rule of violence and might becomes pretty much inevitable, and a drop of doubt might save us gallons of blood. In our modern world of Internet echo chambers and excessive self-confidence in our own views, I think Russell's message is well worth listening to. But, in keeping with this theme, I want to throw some doubt on what we have said so far and instead turn to our old friend Aristotle for some closing thoughts: Theory, practice, and habituation. One of Aristotle's main contributions to our current understanding of the world and of people was that he viewed goodness as not just a form of knowledge, but a habit.

action, whereas Plato had said that true knowledge of goodness would imply that we acted well, and that people only ever acted poorly out of ignorance. Aristotle argued that knowledge by itself did not entail any action. He thought that virtue was a habit we must diligently practice, and that this was true for any virtue - practical, moral, or intellectual. And he would be skeptical of the efficacy of a YouTube video for teaching someone how to be a philosopher. For him, it is with practice that we stumble across all of the little tricks that no one could teach us, but that become integral to our chosen pursuit, and it is what makes us come back to that pursuit over and over again, slowly developing a mastery for it. For instance, a very good friend of mine is an engineer, and whenever he has a problem that is too tricky to solve in the moment, he will look through a math reference book in search of nothing in particular. He rarely finds the solution in the book, but taking a broader view of the problems sometimes makes the answer

just pop out to him without him consciously working on it at all. No one told him this, and it might not even work for someone else, but he found it out through careful experimentation and practice. This is the type of thing Aristotle might call phronesis or practical wisdom. It is knowing what course of action is appropriate in each situation, both morally and practically, and we can only gain this phronesis by engaging with a whole lot of situations. I think the same applies to philosophy. Unless we are born into it, our first forays into the subject will be messy and clumsy, and that is sort of the point. Just as we would not expect to be an expert swimmer after a month of trying, or to revolutionize the art world 3 weeks after picking up a paintbrush, thinking philosophically and critically is a skill that can be trained. I've been practicing it basically full-time for about 6 years now, and I've still not scratched the surface of philosophical insight. I still make habitual mistakes in my reasoning, and I still struggle to

get my head around new concepts, but I truly believe that if we keep at it, we can learn to become more precise, original, fearless, and questioning thinkers. And as we look around the world and see people engaging in endless, pointless arguments where there is not even an attempt to understand one another, where dogma is around every corner, and doubt is seen as a sign of weakness rather than intellectual honesty, I cannot help but feel that we can stand to learn something from these old philosophers. Perhaps what our societies need is a bit more questioning, a bit more specificity, and a bit more doubt. And maybe we could be the people to give it to them. But that's just me, and you may have good reason to question my conclusions. In fact, I encourage you to do so. And a great way to expand your philosophical and critical thinking skills is to learn how to ask good questions. And luckily, I have a video on the legendary questioning technique of Socrates right here. And stick around for more on thinking to improve your life.

How To Think Like a Philosopher

How To Think Like a Philosopher

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