The Philosopher’s Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods

Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl

Oxford: Blackwell, 2003
ISBN 0631228748 (pb), p. 221, £9.99

---

Practical Philosophy  (Book Reviews) Spring 2003 Volume 6.1

Reviewed by: David Arnaud

Practical philosophers are required to be self-reflective about the methods they use. This has been less the case traditionally in academic philosophy and indeed my undergraduate education almost completely avoided any explicit reflection upon the methods of philosophical analysis. If we were to pick these up and assess them, the assumption seemed to be that this would happen implicitly through grappling with philosophical topics that made use of these tools. The explosive growth of critical thinking has brought the issue of explicitness in methodology to the forefront and this book is a welcome extension to this literature.

 

The contents of this excellent book are accurately described by its title. It contains a witty précis and analysis, elegantly and accurately written, of a total of 87 philosophical concepts and methods. These concepts and methods are split into six different sections; basic tools for argument (12, including deduction, induction, and consistency), further tools for argument (11, including abduction, dialectic, and intuition pumps), tools for assessment (29, including category mistakes, error theory, and saving the phenomena), tools for conceptual distinctions (17, including a priori/a posteriori, defeasible/indefeasible, and thick/thin), tools for radical critique (10, including class critique, Foucaultian critique of power, and Pragmatist critique), and tools at the limit (8, including basic beliefs, mystical experience and revelation, and under-determination).

 

The typical entry begins by placing the tool in the context of its use, often with an ingenious everyday example that lets the non-expert get a good initial grasp on the concept, proceeds with an account of the tool, including an assessment of its use, limitations and controversies, provides examples of the tool’s use in the philosophical literature, and ends with brief references for where to find more about the tool and cross-references to other related tools.

 

The authors suggest that there are three possible uses for the book. It can provide an instruction in the essentials of philosophical reflection, serve as a course book for critical thinking and basic philosophical method, and be a reference book to draw upon. This book will certainly find a place near the top of my stack of commonly referred to texts, to be dipped into for insight and clarity concerning the tools it covers. For those teaching a course on critical thinking I would recommend it as a fine second text to back up and expand upon a text that provides more in the way of basic exposition, as well as exercises. Some of the topics that were newish to me in the text, such as error theory, I found illuminating, while others, such as the entry on Derridian deconstruction and critique of presence, which I also knew little about previously, remained opaque to me. This suggests that the extent to which the text can serve as an introductory text is perhaps limited - for some of these tools it might be necessary to already have spent some time grappling with them for these elegant and apposite analyses to be meaningful as summaries.

 

Any selection of tools is likely to reveal the authors’ personal interests. Most of these tools derive from the analytic tradition and virtually all come from the modern period, with the emphasis upon using these tools for understanding philosophy texts. I would have liked more coverage of concepts and methods for examining one’s life, and a glaring omission here appears to be the Socratic elenchus. The authors could reply that the Socratic elenchus is built out of the tools that they cover, such as dialectic and deduction. This might well be true and if so shows that a further area for analysis is composite strategies built from combining a variety of different basic methods. I highly recommend this text to the practical philosopher who will find much of use within.

 

 

PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY page last updated 01/07/2003 contact webmaster: David Arnaud http://www.practical-philosophy.org.uk