Philosophers Toolkit :: How to use this book

As in fine woodworking or surgery, doing philosophy well requires the use of precise and carefully crafted tools.

The Philosopher’s Toolkit provides a collection—or, as we like to call it, a compendium—of the most important among them. This is no “philosophy for dummies” but a larder of clear, terse, and sophisticated resources from which its users can draw. The entries in the Toolkit present the reader with the most powerful concepts, principles, and methods philosophers have developed over the last two and a half millennia—tools with a proven track record of helping us to think and live better. Simply put the Toolkit contains what anyone who wants to read or do philosophy in a serious way ought to know.

One needn’t, however, be a professional or an academic or even a student to use the Toolkit. Entries have been written to be accessible to a wide audience, and they include examples just how each tool might be employed. Tools can be read sequentially, as the text is arranged from the more basic to the more advanced. Or, one can simply pick up and use each tool as the need arises in the course of reading or writing.

Of course, the Toolkit offers a lot to university courses, as well. It may serve as a useful secondary text for a wide variety of courses. The tools it contains on topics like induction, essence, skepticism, and identity will enhance a wide variety of courses---from introduction to philosophy, to logic and critical thinking, to environmental ethics, to epistemology and metaphysics, to courses in the history of philosophy. The Toolkit is also a balanced, pluralistic text. It contains not only tools (like the empiricist critique of metaphysics, pragmatism, and underdetermination) relevant to analytic and Anglo-American philosophy but also entries on decontstruction, Heidegger, Foucault, and Lacan important to those of a continental bent. Each entry is accompanied by a thoughtful list of additional readings on the topic and the text also includes a set of Internet references.