As Anton Chekhof said, "Man is what he believes."
The only liberated mind is a mind equipped to arrive at independent opinions and convictions. My two books with AWA Press are steps in that direction. The torchlight list suggests wonderful books that will not only delight but also inform about recent history and the peoples of the world. Fate and philosophy shows what it is like to use reason to criticise your beliefs about goodness, free will, science, and God.
However, I tackle the greatest problem in How to improve your mind. Who is to be master, you or the modern world? The world fills your mind with conversation, lecturers, newspapers, TV, and the Internet. You must be the gatekeeper that filters out what is worth remembering and decides what is true.Otherwise you are at its mercy.
I suspect the moment you see a term like the naturalistic fallacy (what exactly does that mean?) or confounding variable you stop reading. And if an article is a piece of economic analysis, you never start.
Over the last century and a half, philosophy, social science, economics, and natural science have enriched our minds by giving us wonderful concepts. Anyone who is literate can master the concept of a market and see the darker side of regulating rents and prices and of the merchant banks that led us into the current economic crisis.
Anyone can learn the three concepts that govern international politics and understand why America puts her interests second to those of Israel and why she intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Anyone can master the basic concepts of science and understand its history, significance, the theory of evolution, and its relation to religion.
The concepts of social science, random sample, placebo, charisma effect, how studying something can alter it, will allow you to weigh the opinions "social scientists" give you about contraception, medicine, foods, how to teach arithmetic, race and IQ.
Philosophy has identified mistakes in moral argument that will prevent you from condemning things as "unnatural" or confusing facts and value or unconsciously assuming what you are trying to prove.
The knowledge trap
I have put my heart into over 50 years of university teaching, at places ranging from Cornell and Maryland in America to Canterbury and Otago in New Zealand (Otago is the best). It drives me crazy that there are all these bright young people at universities and yet, when they graduate, we have not taught them how to think.
Despite the scores of lectures and tutorials, the hours of marking and feedback, that I lavished on each of my students, I do not believe I gave them what I value most in thinking my way through life.
The problem is what I call the "knowledge trap".
My original university, the University of Chicago, prided itself on its great books program, books that exposed all undergraduates to philosophy, history, social science, natural science, the humanities, and so forth.
But the problem was that every lecturer was eager to impart knowledge and the Key Concepts get lost in the sheer volume of that knowledge.
I am guilty. When I teach moral and political philosophy, I discuss the pitfalls of tautologies and the naturalistic fallacy. But there are so many fascinating things to teach about Plato's theory of being, his theory of knowledge, his psychology, and his theory of tyranny. And then there is Aristotle and Hobbes and Marx and Nietzsche.
Even if you tell students to note and treasure the Key Concepts as you introduce them one by one, they simply do not stand out from the background of the total content of the course, all of which will be on the examination. The concepts of one course do not appear in the next course, and those encountered in one year are absent the following year.
Students would have to keep a special Key Concepts Diary as a regular chore throughout their undergraduate experience. What university actually advises this, rewards this, and keeps track of whether it is being done? My book is a substitute for the diary that no one keeps.
- James R. Flynn is Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago, New Zealand, where he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate and its Gold Medal for Distinguished Career Research.
At 78 he is the author of several books on philosophy with psychology, including his most recent title How to Improve Your Mind: 20 keys to Unlock the Modern World