Reddit mentions of The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods

Philosopher's Toolkit

You're welcome! I think one of the best resources out there for these distinctions and other important preliminaries to philosophy is The Philosopher's Toolkit. Chapter 4 does a good job on many of the distinctions.

It depends on what you mean. In one sense, you don't really need a book to be able to have discussions about philosophical issues - just someone willing to engage in good faith discussion. But there are some resources that could help you express yourself more effectively.

Philosophers argue using the rules of logic, so one way to learn how to argue effectively is to learn about logic. There are a lot of great internet resources out there that help you learn to discern good reasoning from bad reasoning. But if you do want a book, I like this Critical Thinking textbook. Very readable and very funny.

For something that applies to philosophy more directly, there's the Philosopher's Toolkit. It explains a bunch of concepts and argument forms you're likely to see when doing philosophy.

Beyond that, there are all kinds of primers on the main branches of philosophy and on specific philosophical questions. You can get a feel for the territory by reading introductory texts or Stanford Encyclopedia articles.

Hope this was helpful.

>And I don't pretend that I have anything more than a populist's understanding of these topics. I'm surely just scraping the surface of most topics, misunderstanding things, and I would never think I can be part of an academic conversation because I listen to a couple podcasts.

And I respect you understanding your own ignorance in a topic, because that shows intelligence. Philosophy, interestingly, is the subject that most makes me feel more stupid the more I've studied it, so you're definitely not alone! That being said, many people from the new atheist / "skeptic" community act like this gem

>Yeah, I just say "this is interesting, I'd even like to talk about it with strangers", but I acknowledge the second part of your sentence and am OK realizing my understanding is often limited and quite possibly wrong.


And I think you should use that understanding as motivation to maybe go directly to the sources that these podcasts engage with :) Philosophy is a subject with so many fantastic, but extremely accurate introductory books and I go back to them every now and then to refresh myself on the basics. My favorite example is Prof Simon Blackburn's - Think and another really good piece which goes into a lot of informal logic as well as the jargon: The Philosopher's Toolkit

I find both of those to give an excellent simplification of some of the bigger elements of philosophy without overstretching and misrepresenting their subject matter! :)

This might help: The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods

The Philosopher's Toolkit and The Story of Philosophy both seem like great places to start.

There is a book that I recently bought.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Philosophers-Toolkit-Compendium-Philosophical/dp/1405190183

It is the best resource I could find on philosophical arguments and terms for a beginner.

I started reading philosophy 2 months back and have made some progress thanks to this book. So I wanted to share and hear your views on it if anyone else has given the book a shot.

It depends on if you want to learn about "philosophy" as in the ideas that philosophers have put down and discussed, or if you want "philosophy" as a method of working with those (or any) ideas. Personally, I've always been more interested in philosophy as a method, so if you'd like to eventually be able to have meaningful discourse on philosophical subjects, something like The Philosopher's Toolkit would be a worthwhile read.

If you could provide us with a bit more information about the course, it might be easier for us to make recommendations. For example, is the course you're planning on taking an intro course or an upper level course?

Regardless of the content of the course, however, I think that something like The Philosopher's Toolkit would be a great pickup. Probably much more useful than any single historical work that you might think to pick up. You can also readily find PDF versions of it online, if you know where to look.

Sophie's World is a good recommendation. If you don't want fiction, I'd suggest (and have in other, similar threads) Simon Blackburn's Think as a good, high-level overview of Philosophy. I'd also pick up a text specifically about logic and/or critical thinking that covers basic argument structure and the common fallacies (perhaps The Philosopher's Toolkit ). After reading those, you should have a grasp on both how philosophers do their thing as well as an overview of the various topics in philosophy. From there, you can start reading more about the areas that particularly interest you.

I think the best general introduction to philosophy is Simon Blackburn's Think. It's fairly short and very readable, and it goes from topic to topic talking about both historical and contemporary approaches. This book also might helpful for OP.

> Thinking is not black magic, he has access to no methods of reasoning to which you do not. If you are presented with an argument from him and you cannot refute it despite your best efforts, is it not more sensible to accept that it is likely true rather than that you are simply a mental midget unable to justify your sensible position?


Whoops, missed this, sorry. Fact is, it takes a lot of practice to understand the methods that philosophers use and the disagreement over which methodology is valid or not and where one may (or may not) apply.

Try looking at the table of contents of a book like, The Philosopher's Toolkit by Baggini and Fosl. The methods they use are straightforwardly stated, but it takes practice to master how they work and what they mean in a given situation.

To be absolutely clear, this isn't a relativist statement that all ideas are valid or whatever. I just want to stress the effort, the work, it takes to understand and master these chains of reasoning.