Critical Thinking: Tools for Living an Examined Life

Critical Thinking: Tools for Living an Examined Life features chapters devoted to a wide variety of topics and disciplines that contribute to the development of student's critical thinking skills. The book emphasizes the importance of cultivating one's abilities to distinguish truth from falsity, better understand how ideas and beliefs are formed, become aware of obstacles to knowledge and true belief, and more. The opening chapter focuses on the life and teachings of Socrates with emphasis on his claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living," the Socratic Method, and his moral teaching that the human soul requires justice. Additional chapters examine the primary obstacles to critical thinking-including the idols of the mind and cognitive biases; sensation and perception; the difference between knowledge, truth, and belief; and the ways in which beliefs and knowledge develop through both innate abilities and interaction with the world. Students learn basic principles in both classical logic and modern logic, inductive reasoning, informal fallacies, and moral reasoning and theories of morality. Designed to help students become more fully human by augmenting and refining their most human attribute, their power of reason, Critical Thinking is an ideal textbook for courses and programs in philosophy, as well as classes in the social sciences, especially those with emphasis in the development of critical thinking skills.