One thing that served me well, I think, was ambition. Even before I went to college, when I was first falling in love with philosophy, my goal was to solve it. I wanted my worldview to make sense, dammit, and not be full of contradictions and incoherencies and “we don’t ask that question” moments. Most of the philosophers regarded as great (Leibniz, Russell, Lewis, etc.) were grand systematizers who attempted to have an answer to everything, and were not satisfied with paradoxes/contradictions/incoherencies/articles-of-faith anywhere. Alas, no one so far has been able to succeed at this ambition, but nevertheless I think I learned so much more, and came to beliefs that are so much better, because of it.
Why? Well, one reason (though probably not the only reason) is that it helped me prioritize. It helped me move on from interesting-but-not-that-important puzzles and go for the Big Questions. And go straight for the throat instead of lollygagging.
The experience of trying to construct a coherent, non-contradictory complete worldview, only to encounter some new problem or puzzle that brings it crashing down, repeatedly is perhaps analogous to the experience of trying to construct a hypothesis about how celestial bodies move, or how optics works, or something, that can accurately predict all the data from all your experiments.
Have a big list of questions, which approximates all the big questions in philosophy.
Try to answer all of them from a plausible, coherent perspective.
Get feedback on how coherent (and plausible) the perspective is, how well-argued the answers were, etc.
Or, perhaps, a courtroom-like examination process where a committee selects a line of questioning? (Roughly, draw some questions randomly off of the Big List to try to catch the student off-guard, and then depending on the student’s answers, go down a line of questioning which best searches for flaws in the view?)
Funnily enough, the medieval Disputations practice seems to have been kinda like this? Not the game version we played, the version that was used for dissertation defenses. IIRC.
Direct and immediate feedback is a good idea. Given your first suggestion, is the assumption that philosophers would attempt to address everything? Many are going to be specializing, and may not have thought much about many central questions. I can tell you a lot about metaethics. I can’t tell you much about metaphysics. Maybe that’s a mistake, but given the current incentive system and the way academic fields are set up, it’d be hard not to narrowly focus in this way.
Given your first suggestion, is the assumption that philosophers would attempt to address everything?
I was just trying to go off of Daniel K’s prompt, which was precisely for philosophers to try to address everything. I agree that this is not obviously the best route.
One thing that served me well, I think, was ambition. Even before I went to college, when I was first falling in love with philosophy, my goal was to solve it. I wanted my worldview to make sense, dammit, and not be full of contradictions and incoherencies and “we don’t ask that question” moments. Most of the philosophers regarded as great (Leibniz, Russell, Lewis, etc.) were grand systematizers who attempted to have an answer to everything, and were not satisfied with paradoxes/contradictions/incoherencies/articles-of-faith anywhere. Alas, no one so far has been able to succeed at this ambition, but nevertheless I think I learned so much more, and came to beliefs that are so much better, because of it.
Why? Well, one reason (though probably not the only reason) is that it helped me prioritize. It helped me move on from interesting-but-not-that-important puzzles and go for the Big Questions. And go straight for the throat instead of lollygagging.
The experience of trying to construct a coherent, non-contradictory complete worldview, only to encounter some new problem or puzzle that brings it crashing down, repeatedly is perhaps analogous to the experience of trying to construct a hypothesis about how celestial bodies move, or how optics works, or something, that can accurately predict all the data from all your experiments.
To turn this into a training technique, we might:
Have a big list of questions, which approximates all the big questions in philosophy.
Try to answer all of them from a plausible, coherent perspective.
Get feedback on how coherent (and plausible) the perspective is, how well-argued the answers were, etc.
Or, perhaps, a courtroom-like examination process where a committee selects a line of questioning? (Roughly, draw some questions randomly off of the Big List to try to catch the student off-guard, and then depending on the student’s answers, go down a line of questioning which best searches for flaws in the view?)
Funnily enough, the medieval Disputations practice seems to have been kinda like this? Not the game version we played, the version that was used for dissertation defenses. IIRC.
Direct and immediate feedback is a good idea. Given your first suggestion, is the assumption that philosophers would attempt to address everything? Many are going to be specializing, and may not have thought much about many central questions. I can tell you a lot about metaethics. I can’t tell you much about metaphysics. Maybe that’s a mistake, but given the current incentive system and the way academic fields are set up, it’d be hard not to narrowly focus in this way.
I was just trying to go off of Daniel K’s prompt, which was precisely for philosophers to try to address everything. I agree that this is not obviously the best route.