Saturday 5 October 2013

Making your life better - learning how to spot when they try to trick you: An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments

One thing philosophers are good at is reasoning. Whether practical or theoretical, if you can make the question sufficiently clear they can help you understand better what you have to make up your mind about, what question you need to ask, what you need to discover - and this is not only true of personal affairs.

To acquire reasoning skills can be quite hard. Most philosophers get some education in logic, and also they have to read pieces of writing which present arguments for and against positions on a certain question.

But as they say: "In philosophy we always begin in the deep, because there is no shallow." This fact can tickle one's self-esteem when one is already well ahead in the studies, but can be scary to starters, to people only interested in philosophy out of curiosity, to the wider public (and employees of funding bodies), and to those who we should attract: the potential students.

Therefore I always greet with joy good publications that help introduce people without previous training to parts of philosophy.

Ali Almossawi's book does splendid work on this front. And another great thing about it: it's freely available online. Although not compulsory, I would strongly encourage everyone to donate at least a few bucks. Being in the process of writing a book I can appreciate the effort that goes into such an enterprise. Now, have a look at the book and enjoy - if possible with your kids or youngsters.

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