Notes on Perry and Bratman's Introduction

• philosophy as practical and potentially liberating.  Why?  Most of our foundational beliefs have simply been absorbed from our parents, our peers, and our culture generally.  To the extent that we have not considered them critically, in relation to alternative views, we haven't really adopted or chosen them; we just find ourselves with them.  Critical reflection, even if it changes none of our most basic beliefs, can make them more truly our own.  (And of course we may find that in fact some of them do change.)
• College years as a good time to engage in this sort of critical reflection.  Life goes by awfully fast; there may well be no better time than the present to seriously ponder your most basic beliefs.
• Need to read slowly and aggressively.  This involves conducting a kind of dialogue with the author of the text you are reading:  continually asking questions about what the author means and how the author's views are argued for in the piece.   P&B's example of reading the beginning of Descartes's Meditations gives a good example of what this is like.  It is very important here to note that philosophy needs to be read not just for a general sense of where the author is coming from.  Instead, we need to do at least the following.
  1. try to determine exactly what the author's theses are (by constantly asking questions about what the text means and what its implications are, and then trying to answer these questions by studying the text further).
  2. Determine what the author's arguments for his or her position are: what reasons are offered to try to convince us of the truth of this position?  More specifically, what are the premisses from which the conclusion is supposed to follow?  Why is it supposed to follow from them?
  3. Evaluate the arguments offered.  This involves at least two things: (a) determining whether the arguments are valid, i.e. whether, if the premisses are true, the conclusion must be true as well; and (b) determining whether the premisses are true.   (If an argument is valid and its premisses are true, the argument is said to be sound.)
• Important skills to acquire:
  1. analyzing statements and arguments
  2. imagining alternatives to familiar views and situations (try to think of counterexamples to general claims, but also try to see why someone might accept a view that seems strange or unfamiliar)
  3. state things "explicitly, clearly, and succinctly"
  4. think creatively