Philosophy and critical thinking overview

I recently completed Philosophy and Critical Thinking (Syllabus), an edX course. The course took about 2 weeks, on and off. This is my second course in philosophy, and my earlier writing on a previous course can be found here.

The course contains 6 modules in total. The format is, for each module there are submodules, and most submodules have text that explains the ideas, accompanied by videos that are a distilled version of the text. Finally, each module includes a graded quiz. The course intertwines philosophy (philosophical ideas i.e. who said what at some point) and critical thinking (logic).

(Meta) The way I consumed the contents:

Skimming through the texts, including ChatGPT section summaries (this was particularly useful)
Watching all videos
Taking notes (thus this blog post)

(Meta Meta) Talking about the way I consumed the content gives more information about what my actions might have been during the course 🙂

In this blog post, I will briefly overview the ideas being discussed.

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Hva er filosofi overview

In this blog post, I will write an overview of the book “Hva er filosofi” (What is philosophy?) by Lars Svendsen.

At a local bookstore, I bought a version that was translated into my native language. The translation isn’t the best, but I still finished the book as I found the content interesting and was able to get past the syntactical issues by ignoring them and merely focusing on the content 🙂 As a matter of fact, I think the syntactical issues were actually a good thing. I mostly write blog posts like this one because it helps me with crystallizing ideas, and when I try to explain parts of the book I can’t just copy/paste, I have to work on paraphrasing using (hopefully, what is) non-broken grammar.

I have read a couple of philosophy books in the past period, and I have to say that this book is probably the most meta of them all. I had one picture in mind as to what philosophy represents (argument+idea), but reading this book extended that view: philosophy is everything and nothing.

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GEB: An EGB overview (Part II)

This post is a follow-up to the first part.

However, before proceeding with the usual format as in the previous post, I will make a small comment.

I was very amazed by the first part of the book, so before starting the second part I viewed the book’s references. One book caught my attention: “What is the Name of this Book?”. So I ordered it and I read it. I found the book’s author’s style to be very similar to GEB’s style: puns, self-references, discussions about meaning, and paradoxes. So if you follow GEB’s references, you can almost see how GEB’s author’s style came to be.

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Stutz overview

Recently I watched Stutz on Netflix (trailer here). It’s an interesting documentary that talks about several life hacks (tools) that one can find useful. In this blog post, I’ll list some of those tools.

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Spirit, Soul, Body

Similar to a previous book, I bought this book (1945) from the same Church, and in this blog post, I’ll write a short summary of the read. The author of the book is a medical doctor from the Russian Empire.

The book is a quick read, has about 140 pages, and reads very easily. It has a total of 9 chapters. It contains various verses and then explains them in medical layman’s terms.

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