The Philosopher's Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room (Great Courses) (Teaching Company) DVD (Course Number 4253)

Thinking is at the heart of our everyday lives, yet our thinking can go wrong in any number of ways. Bad arguments, fallacious reasoning, misleading language, and built-in cognitive biases are all traps that keep us from rational decision making-to say nothing of advertisers and politicians who want to convince us with half-truths and empty rhetoric. What can we do to avoid these traps and think better? Is it possible to think faster, more efficiently, and more systematically? The Philosopher's Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room offers the skills to do just that. Taught by award-winning Professor Patrick Grim of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, this applied philosophy course arms you against the perils of bad thinking and supplies you with an arsenal of strategies to help you be more creative, logical, inventive, realistic, and rational in all aspects of your daily life, from the office to the voting booth. Unlike courses in other disciplines, which are descriptive, this course is normative. That is, instead of merely describing how we do think, the focus of this course is how we should think. Along the way, you'll meet some of history's greatest thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to Einstein and John von Neumann. In addition to looking at what they thought, you'll study how they thought-what strategies did they employ to come up with their great ideas? What tools can we adopt to make us better thinkers?