Professor Patrick Grim - The Philosopher’s Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room

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01 How We Think and How to Think Better
02 Cool Rationality and Hot Thought
03 The Strategy of Visualization
04 Visualizing Concepts and Propositions
05 The Power of Thought Experiments
06 Thinking like Aristotle
07 Ironclad, Airtight Validity
08 Thinking outside the Box
09 The Flow of Argument
10 Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
11 Why We Make Misteaks
12 Rational Discussion in a Polarized Context
13 Rhetoric versus Rationality
14 Bogus Arguments and How to Defuse Them
15 The Great Debate
16 Outwitting the Advertiser
17 Putting a Spin on Statistics
18 Poker, Probability, and Everyday Life
19 Decisions, Decisions
20 Thinking Scientifically
21 Put It to the Test—Beautiful Experiments
22 Game Theory and Beyond
23 Thinking with Models
24 Lessons from the Great Thinkers

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?

With a blend of theoretical and hands-on learning, these 24 stimulating lectures will sharpen your critical thinking skills and get the creative juices flowing with such topics as

the symbiotic role of reason and emotion;
conceptual visualization and thinking with models;
Aristotle’s logic and the flow of arguments;
heuristics and psychological biases;
polarization and negotiation strategies;
advertising and statistics; and
decision theory and game theory.

Study What You Didn't Learn in School