The Philosopher's Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room

By: Patrick Grim, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Patrick Grim

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. 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, taught by award-winning Professor Patrick Grim of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, 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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2013 The Great Courses (P)2013 The Teaching Company, LLC

Philosophy for the rest of us without being watered down.

One of the few books I’ve seen by a modern philosopher written as advice on how we might live our lives better. It looks like Prof Grim has descended the ivory tower, or perhaps never entered it, because he realizes philosophy should be a guide to everyday life and let’s us down if it can’t be. A highly recommend listen!

High Recommended Lecture

Gaining deep understanding of our thinking and how philosophically we drive our thinking is helping us to understand life better. This leads to joy for me and I would recommend it to anyone who intends to embark on a philosophical journey. However, my joy comes from using the teachings of Jesus Christ as my reference point to unlock the wisdom in this lecture.

Inspiring

Easy understand and have a broaders View and life. Overall it was pretty awesome

thanks.

Really quite great

I only have 1 possible qualm with this work: sometimes the lectures references visuals.

I understand the difference in modality, and in fact part of the beauty of the book is it teaches tips in “visualization”, although a few scarce anecdotes were “lost in translation” when the Professor was referencing a visual that was present during the initial lecture, although absent in the audio medium. “Watch this video and…” “observe on this graph…”. I felt well equipped to IMAGINE these things as a product of the book, but the HANDFUL (very few) times they came up I was sort of left with an “oh well…” feeling. There IS an accompanying PDF that covers some of this, not all.

somewhat lacking without supporting material

He references visuals often (matrices you can draw, conversation diagrams etc) and without that material, some of the meaning is lost. however, it's very interesting and does what it sets out to do. Good solid audibook