Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World Through Experience and Reason

English | Audio MP3 (24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture) + Guide Book PDF | 174 Mb
What is the best way to prove a case, create a rule, solve a problem, justify an idea, invent a hypothesis, or evaluate an argument? In other words, what is the best way to think?

Everyone has to think in order to function in the world, and this course will equip you with the tools to reason effectively in your pursuit of reliable beliefs and useful knowledge. Whether you are a budding philosopher searching for ultimate truths, a science student grappling with the nature of scientific proof, a new parent weighing conflicting childrearing advice, or a concerned citizen making up your mind about today's issues, Tools of Thinking will help you cut through deception and faulty reasoning to get closer to the essence of a matter.

An "Amiable, Humorous, Clear, and Interesting" Teacher

Your teacher is Professor James Hall, an award-winning educator who was hailed as "amiable, humorous, clear, and interesting, and, thankfully, never pedantic" in an AudioFile magazine review of his previous course for The Teaching Company, Philosophy of Religion.

In Tools of Thinking, Professor Hall turns his friendly but intellectually rigorous approach to the problem of thinking, introducing you to a range of effective techniques, including:

* Deduction: This form of reasoning reaches a conclusion based on a set of premises; if the premises are true, then the conclusion necessarily follows. The classic case of deduction is the Euclidean proof in geometry.
* Induction: Less ironclad than deduction, this approach surveys the evidence and then generalizes an explanation to account for it; the conclusion may be probable, but it is not certain. Scientists typically use inductive reasoning.
* Syllogism: This is a simple but powerful deductive argument with two premises and a conclusion. An example: "All Greeks are mortals. All Athenians are Greeks. Therefore, all Athenians are mortals."
* Boolean Algebra: Invented by George Boole in the 19th century, this system, also known as Boolean logic, gave new flexibility to logical analysis and contributed to the development of the computer.
* Avoiding Fallacious Reasoning: Inferences and explanations that rely on irrelevant "evidence" fail, being guilty of the fallacy of non sequitur. An example of this is ad populum, which amounts to inferring that a point of view or opinion must be true because it is widely held.

"The Magic is in the Mix"

"There is no one tool for thinking," says Professor Hall. "The magic is in the mix." You explore that mix through the ideas of some of history's greatest philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill, among others. You also review the rudiments of logic, an unrivalled technique for separating ideas that don't make sense from those that do. And you learn how to recognize some notoriously egregious—and common—errors of thought.

What You Will Learn
The course is divided into five sections:

Lectures 1 and 2, Introduction: You begin by investigating how our minds make sense of the world. Then you focus on eight fundamental tools of thought: experience, memory, association, pattern discernment and recognition, reason, invention, experimentation, and intuition.

Lectures 3–9, Ancient Views: Plato and Aristotle laid the foundation for rational inquiry, each emphasizing different tools of thought. Aristotle's focus on what we can infer from observation led him to formulate the rules of logic. You explore these developments and the modern treatment of ancient logic by George Boole and John Venn.

Lectures 10–14, Early Modern Views: You investigate René Descartes' program of "systematic doubt." Then you look at the ideas of David Hume, who carried doubt even further. After studying examples of fallacious reasoning, you move to John Stuart Mill, who proposed a method for dealing with one of Hume's most intractable quandaries: the problem of induction.

Lectures 15–22, Modern Rational Empiricism: The scientific approach to reasoning is called modern rational empiricism. You start with Isaac Newton's contributions to this amazingly productive mode of inquiry and then delve into the logical underpinnings of science. You end this section with three lectures on formal logic.

Lectures 23 and 24, How Do Things Stand Today? You explore the objections to modern rational empiricism by movements such as postmodernism. In the final lecture, you reach an understanding of thinking as open-ended. "The more we think," says Professor Hall, "the more things to think about we think of."

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