...we only ascribe liberal education
to one who...is critical in all, or nearly all, branches
of knowledge. - Aristotle
Philosophy is critical thinking. Deciding whether an idea
is worth believing takes intellectual and emotional maturity.  That’s
why you probably didn’t study philosophy in high school,
and it’s one reason many college students don’t
study it.
Philosophers do two things that make them unusual: they
take both good and bad ideas seriously, and they think reflectively.
- If a judge decides you’re guilty before weighing
the evidence, you won’t get a good hearing. Some
ideas that appear bad at first turn out to be good after
they are critically examined. That’s why philosophers
take all ideas seriously, even ideas that appear to be
bad.
- How do we know what we know? Is a bad mother “unnatural”?
How do we tell smut from art? We must reflect to answer
these questions, or think about thinking. To do
that, we must already have learned to think about nature,
human history, literature, and art.
Although philosophy is different from science, history, literature,
and art, it is related to all of them. And just as they have
practical value, so does philosophy.
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