LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Some of the best-known ancient texts, connected to many of the great civilizations around the world, are religious or mythological in nature. Examples include the Vedas of India, the…
Figure 3.1 This cuneiform tablet from Anatolia has been dated to circa 1875–1840 BCE. The development of writing should not be equated with the development of a culture’s sense of meaning and history, but writing does make that meaning and history available to those living much…
The Brain Is an Inference Machine Our brains facilitate our survival and promote our ability to find a partner and reproduce by using thought, calculation, prediction, and inference. For this reason, our natural and genetically primed ways of thinking do…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: This section will provide some practical advice on how to write philosophy papers. The format presented here focuses on the use of an argumentative structure in writing.…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: To be successful in a philosophy course, you must be able to read primary and secondary sources in philosophy. Many students in their first philosophy class struggle…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Start with a Strong Foundation When you are learning a new concept or writing a paper, you probably do some internet research to locate information about the…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: One of the ways to respond to cognitive biases is to develop good habits of mind. There are no quick fixes or easy solutions to cognitive biases.…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: To resist the potential pitfalls of cognitive biases, we have taken some time to recognize why we fall prey to them. Now we need to understand how…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: One of the first steps to becoming a more critical and reflective thinker is to understand how and why you are prone to making mistakes in thinking.…
Figure 2.1 Thinking: a sculpture of two figures in Prague. (credit: modification of “Thinking” by Kurtis Garbutt/Flickr, CC BY 2.0) Chapter Outline 2.1 The Brain Is an Inference Machine 2.2 Overcoming Cognitive Biases and Engaging in Critical Reflection 2.3 Developing Good Habits of Mind 2.4 Gathering…