Success-Driven Philosophy: Finding Clarity of Purpose and Achieving Arete Through Philosophical Examination [Archive.org URL]

The 7-step Philosophical Method

1. Define your question. Finding your philosophy is supposed to bring you clarity, but you can’t find clarity if you don’t ask clear questions. Make sure you understand the questions you are asking before trying to look for an answer. Sometimes if you are at a dead end with a question, try broadening or narrowing the scope. For instance, if you are stuck on “Is there a God?” you might try a question like “Is there a God who cares about me personally?”
2. Find a Starting Point. To make some headway, it’s usually best if you have a starting point. You can find this either through your gut, immediate response, what you have been taught, what society traditionally believes, or an idea from other philosophers. You can even initially disagree with a starting point; in fact, it is often helpful if you do because it makes the next steps easier.
3. Does your Starting Point seem right intuitively? When philosophers try to approach an idea, they ask if it makes sense intuitively. However, the important thing is to figure out why the starting point makes sense (or doesn’t). Having a feeling that something “seems right” or “seems weird” isn’t enough. You must be able to explain why it doesn’t make sense.
4. Test the Starting Point in many different situations. To figure out whether something does or doesn’t make sense, it’s helpful to test the idea in various situations. Say you ask the question “Is killing people wrong?” and your starting point is “Killing people is always wrong.” Perhaps your gut-check reaction is “it makes sense”. But test the answer in various situations. Is killing a death row prisoner wrong? Is killing a soldier in a battle wrong? Is a victim of rape getting an abortion wrong? Perhaps you might say yes to all of these scenarios and many others that you think of–then perhaps the statement is really part of your philosophy. But if there is a hiccup, then you need to figure out why you disagree with a certain scenario.
5. Use Logical Progression. This is another way of figuring out why something makes sense or doesn’t and that is by using logical progression. What you do is make a series of “if this, then this. If that, then that…” and so on. For example, if your question is “How do I know if something is true?” and your starting point is “If I really believe it” then you want to ask “If something is true because I really believe it, then if the reverse must also be true – If I really believe something, then it must be true.” Does that sound right? Did your first boyfriend really love you forever? Did you really fail that tough test? By following ideas logically, we can find other sorts of inconsistencies that need to be corrected.
6. Investigate inconsistencies. The worst insult a philosopher can level at another is that he or she is inconsistent. When you find an inconsistency in your starting point, either through a certain situation or through a logical progression, you need to figure out what is wrong with the inconsistency. What makes this situation or this conclusion disagree with your starting point? For example if you say that God exists and is all-powerful, all-knowing, and completely benevolent, then you must consider (and explain) the inconsistency of why He (or She) allows evil to exist in the world.
7. Revise your Starting Point. Once you have some ideas about what is wrong or right with your starting point, you’ll want to revise it and return to step one.