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Mar 12, 2025
Values and Intellectual Traits [2 of 2]
Genuine intellectual development requires people to develop intellectual traits, traits acquired only by thinking one's way to basic philosophical insights. Philosophical thinking leads to insights which in turn shape basic skills of thought. Skills, values, insights, and intellectual traits are mutually and dynamically interrelated. It is the whole person who thinks, not some fragment of the person.
For example, intellectual empathy requires the ability to reconstruct accurately the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than one's own. But if one has not developed the philosophical insight that different people often think from divergent premises, assumptions, and ideas, one will never appreciate the need to entertain them. Reasoning from assumptions and ideas other than our own will seem absurd to us precisely to the degree that we are unable to step back philosophically and recognize that differences exist between people in their very frameworks for thinking.
Philosophical differences are common, even in the lives of small children. Children often reason from the assumption that their needs and desires are more important than anyone else's to the conclusion that they ought to get what they want in this or that circumstance. It often seems absurd to children that they are not given what they want. They are trapped in their egocentric viewpoints, see the world from within them, and unconsciously take their viewpoints (their philosophies, if you will) to define reality. To work out of this intellectual entrapment requires time and much reflection.
To develop consciousness of the limits of our understanding we must attain the courage to face our prejudices and ignorance. To discover our prejudices and ignorance in turn we often have to empathize with and reason within points of view toward which we are hostile. To achieve this end, we must persevere over an extended . . .
Mar 03, 2025
Intellectual perseverance is the disposition to work your way through intellectual complexities despite frustrations inherent in the task. Questions that foster intellectual perseverance include:
Don’t give up on intellectual tasks on account of their difficulty. When you begin to think you can’t learn something, remind yourself that you can. If reading is hard for you, stick to it; reading important works is essential to deep learning, and is a powerful tool for mental wellness and self-actualization. These same benefits come from writing, so when writing is hard, keep trying. Don’t be afraid to work hard when you feel like giving up. Remember that no matter how good you are at thinking, you can always improve, and the failure to do so will undermine the quality of your life and the lives of others. In short, no matter how much you struggle with learning, keep working. Never give up. Be the captain of your own ship. Chart your own course in life.
Internalize the Idea: Intellectual Perseverance
Most people have more physical perseverance than intellectual perseverance. Many are ready to admit, “No pain, no gain!” when talking about the body. Most give up quickly, on the other hand, when faced with a frustrating mental problem that requires their best thinking. Thinking of your own responses, in your work or your personal life, how would you evaluate your intellectual perseverance on a scale of 0 to 10? Complete these statements:
1. In terms of intellectual perseverance, I would rate myself as follows…
2. I say this because… [Support your position with evidence.]
3. I could develop intellectual perseverance by routinely doing the following…
For more on close reading and substantive writing, visit the Reading and Writing Alcove in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online.
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This blog is adapted from pages 167 and 173 of Linda Elder’s Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness & Self-Actualization (2025), available through Treely Green Publishing at www.treelygreenpublishing.com.
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Values and Intellectual Traits [1 of 2]
Philosophical thinking, like all human thinking, is infused with values. But those who think philosophically make it a point to understand and assent to the values that underlie their thought. One thinks philosophically because one values coming to terms with the meaning and significance of one's life. If we do so sincerely and well, we recognize problems that challenge us to decide the kind of person we want to make ourselves, including deciding the kind of mind we want to have. We have to make a variety of value judgments about ourselves regarding, among other things, fears, conflicts, and prejudices. This requires us to come to terms with the traits of mind we are developing. For example, to be truly open to knowledge, one must become intellectually humble. But intellectual humility is connected with other traits, such as intellectual courage, intellectual integrity, intellectual perseverance, intellectual empathy, and fairmindedness. The intellectual traits characteristic of our thinking become for the philosophical thinker a matter of personal concern. Philosophical reflection heightens this concern.
Consider this excerpt from a letter from a teacher with a master’s degree in physics and mathematics:
After I started teaching, I realized that I had learned physics by rote and that I really did not understand all I knew about physics. My thinking students asked me questions for which I always had the standard textbook answers, but for the first time made me start thinking for myself, and I realized that these canned answers were not justified by my own thinking and only confused my students who were showing some ability to think for themselves. To achieve my academic goals I had memorized the thoughts of others, but I had never learned or been encouraged to learn to think for myself.
This is a good example of. . .
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Feb 11, 2025
As you work to pursue reasonable purposes, realize that it is a grave error to be naïve as to the world you face and the options available to you within the constraints of society. Again, the human world you inhabit creates parameters within which you are, to a large degree, forced to live. The highest-level thinkers work to expand those parameters or change them for the better, but all humans inhabit societies which require individuals to behave in given ways—whether these individuals want to or not, and whether it makes sense to or not. For instance, each of us is required to belong to some country and own proof of our nationality, especially if we want to travel internationally. Each of us is expected to adhere to our country’s laws, whether the laws are fair or not. To be accepted into typical human groups, all of us must follow certain (often unwritten) social guidelines on such matters as how we dress or wear our hair.
Some social customs and rules are harmless or even helpful; others cause suffering, as people and other sentient creatures become victims of unreasonable laws, customs, and taboos. Your mental health problems may stem from this very problem. Perhaps you have had difficulty fitting yourself into what you perceive to be unjust or nonsensical rules and customs of your society, family, or employer. As you analyze your situation, remember that it always might be you who is self-deceived; you may perceive something to be unreasonable when it is really your own thinking that is unreasonable. To develop your ability to determine whether it is you or someone else who is self-deceived in a given context, internalize and actively use the tools found in Chapter Four on the barriers to critical thinking and Chapter Six on intellectual standards.
Some problems caused by social ideologies, groupthink, or other forms of sociocentrism are far more significant than others. Some of your country’s laws are or have been more unfair than others, sometimes egregiously so (as with regard to slavery, tortuous animal experimentation, and imprisonment without due process). Some of your society’s customs are more distasteful or repulsive than others (such as pressuring students to pray to a particular deity, withholding opportunities based upon gender, or adulating a monarchy, the wealthy, or the famous). Some of the groups you belong to, and the people within those groups (such as family, friends, neighbors, social and religious groups, etc.), behave in more superficial or otherwise irrational ways than others.
To protect yourself from narrowminded people, institutions, and ideologies, it is essential that you learn to critique the customs, laws, traditions, and taboos of your society, and of all the groups and people who in any way have influence over you— including where you have allowed this influence. Being unaware of how society restricts you and impacts your purposes, needs, and desires can easily cause you to be mentally unwell.
Internalize the Idea: Eliminate Purposes You Pursue that Stem from Irrational Societal Influence
Figure out which of your purposes are not adding to the quality of your life, and which you pursue uncritically due to societal influences. Concentrate on giving higher priority to the important purposes in your life. Complete these statements:
This blog is adapted from pages 241 and 242 of Linda Elder’s Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness & Self-Actualization (2025), available through Treely Green Publishing at www.treelygreenpublishing.com.
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Feb 04, 2025
Post-Transcript Analysis and Discussion [3 of 3]
All subjects, in sum, can be taught philosophically or unphilosophically. Let me illustrate by using the subject of history. Since philosophical thinking tends to make our most basic ideas and assumptions explicit, by using it we can better orient ourselves toward the subject as a whole and mindfully integrate the parts into the whole.
Students are introduced to history early in their education, and that subject area is usually required through high school and into college, and with good reason. But the unphilosophical way history is often taught fails to develop students' ability to think historically for themselves. Indeed, history books basically tell students what to believe and what to think about history. Students have little reason in most history classes to relate the material to the framework of their own ideas, assumptions, or values. Students do not know that they have a philosophy, and even if they did, it is doubtful that without the stimulation of a teacher who approached the subject philosophically they would see the relevance of history to it.
But consider the probable outcome of teachers raising and facilitating discussion questions such as the following . . .
Jan 28, 2025
For your mental well-being, it is essential to think critically about the purposes that drive your behavior and the quality of your life. This requires deeply understanding your ultimate purposes as well as the role that purpose plays across human life. Without significant purposes that are self-chosen, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to be fulfilled. Most people do not actively choose their purposes, and where they do, they tend to choose some purposes well and others poorly. It is rare for someone to actively choose and command all of their important purposes, but this should be your goal.
Attaining mental well-being requires pursuing important goals while being realistic about the purposes available to you and your means for achieving important purposes. Mental wellness is accomplished through, among other things, a powerful internal will to realize your goals and make the most of your life. It requires understanding and commanding your purposes in dealing with others, and in working through issues throughout your daily experience. It requires eliminating obstacles, internal and external, that would interfere with the achievement of your goals. Emotional well-being requires that you rationally control the story you tell yourself about your past, present, and future. It means understanding the limitations humans place on themselves and each other, including at the societal level, in terms of what purposes are even allowed. It entails understanding how your purposes may be affected by the pathologies of others.
In short, we choose many of our purposes in accord with societal beliefs, customs, and taboos. At the same time, we frequently deceive ourselves into believing that we deliberately choose the purposes that are dictated to us. For your mental well-being, it is essential that you clearly understand and take command of your purposes – those you choose as well as those thrust upon you by parents, supervisors, children, friends, neighbors, and any other groups to which you belong or persons you allow to influence you.
Internalize the Idea: Explore Your Important Purposes
Think seriously about the primary purposes you pursue as you go through your daily life. Make a list of each of these purposes and complete the following statements for each one. Go as far as you need to in this activity:
1. One primary purpose in my life is . . .
2. This purpose is important because . . .
3. I [do/do not] commit enough time to pursuing this purpose.
4. To pursue this purpose more assertively and productively, I need to . . .
5. Therefore, I intend to achieve this purpose more fully by doing the following . . .
[Periodically reread your answer to #5 to make sure you are progressing.]
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This blog is adapted from pages 237, 238, and 240 of Linda Elder’s Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness & Self-Actualization (2025), available through Treely Green Publishing at www.treelygreenpublishing.com
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Jan 13, 2025
Post-Transcript Analysis and Discussion [2 of 4]
When teachers approach their subjects philosophically, they make it much easier for students to begin to integrate their thinking across subject matter divisions. In the preceding discussion, for example, the issues considered involved personal experience, psychology, sociology, ethics, culture, and philosophy.
The issues, philosophically put, made these diverse areas relevant to each other. And just as one might inquire into a variety of issues by first asking a basic philosophical question, so one might proceed in the other direction: first asking a question within a subject area and then, by approaching it philosophically, [exploring] its relationships to other subjects. These kinds of transitions are quite natural and unforced in a philosophical discussion, because all dimensions of human study and experience are indeed related to each other. We would see this if we could set aside the blinders that usually come with conventional discipline-specific instruction. By routinely considering root questions and root ideas philosophically, we naturally pursue those connections freed of these blinders.
As teachers teaching philosophically, we are continually interested in what the students themselves think on basic matters and issues. We continually encourage students to explore how what they think about X relates to what they think about Y and Z. This necessarily requires that students' thought moves back and forth between their own basic ideas and those presented in class by other students, between their own ideas and those expressed in a book, between their thinking and their experiences, between ideas within one domain and those in another.
This dialogical process (moving back and forth between divergent domains and points of view) will sometimes become dialectical (some ideas will clash or be inconsistent with others). The act of integrating thinking is deeply tied to the act of assessing thinking, because, as we consider a diversity of ideas, we discover that many of them contradict . . .
Jan 06, 2025
A great number of books and resources are now available for those who struggle to find happiness or contentment in the world we humans have crafted. Throughout the past half-century or more, a tremendous mass of literature has been developed to help humans become satisfied and fulfilled. The problems of depression, anxiety, and related emotional states are increasingly in focus through this literature. And yet, with all our knowledge and wisdom, with all our books and guides and videos, and with all the scientific promises, humans are still doing a relatively poor job of alleviating the suffering caused by depression, anxiety, and similar tormenting states of mind. Similarly, we have yet to effectively deal with the irritability, defensiveness, irrational anger, and self-justifying behavior that, though they may not lead to depression or anxiety, keep people from relating intimately with others and developing their innate capacities. And even those who do not experience pervasive negative emotions will yet rarely achieve self-realization or self-actualization, which is the most fulfilling level of thinking and living; this requires achieving the skills and abilities, and embodying the virtues, of the fairminded critical thinker. And it is self-actualized people, unfettered by nagging negative emotions, who can potentially make the greatest contributions to improving human life, as well as our treatment of the earth and its sentient creatures.
To understand why achieving mental well-being is difficult for you and for many others, you should understand a few things about the human mind itself.
Perhaps first, the human animal is highly complex. Each of us is unique, while we share the following basic tendencies, which are manifest at various times, at varying levels of degree, and within differing circumstances: selfishness, narrowmindedness, groupishness (group selfishness) and group-neediness, reasonability and rationality. Humans are both self-oriented and group-oriented, with the innate need to develop our individual selves while being part of human groups. Our self-orientation has an egocentric dimension, leading us to be frequently selfish and/or intellectually arrogant (trapped within a limited viewpoint). Our need for group contact has a sociocentric dimension, leading us to be frequently groupish (participating in group selfishness) and/or uncritical conformists (going along with a given group without questioning its motives and practices). In short, all human beings have, by their very nature, innate tendencies that cause problems for themselves and others. These tendencies lie at the heart of common mental health problems such as chronic depression, anxiety, discontentment, anger, and irritability. Yet, you can command your egocentric and sociocentric tendencies through the development of your rational capacities. This becomes more clear as you internalize the tools of critical thinking and apply them to your personal and emotional life.
Second, the human mind is fundamentally linguistic. This means we largely live in the ideas we develop in our minds as we age; we are influenced by all manner of conditioning that influences the ideas we accept or reject. Our ideas are the concepts we have mentally formulated to make sense of the world. Our “accepted” ideas become formed into ideologies, or belief systems, which we then attempt to live in accordance with (and frequently force onto others). However, these ideas, which we naturally believe to be correct and sound, often defy logic, such as how people frequently conceptualize love to mean getting something from another person, or security, or romance. Many of our ideas are distorted due to the many prejudices, stereotypes, delusions, illusions, and other pathologies we are potentially taught by parents, teachers, religions, social groups, clubs, peers, and indeed anyone who has had influence over us, coupled with our innate ability to deceive ourselves into believing what we wish to believe. The human child may begin life without pathological ideologies, but all children soak up unsound ideas from those around them (since all children are highly dependent on others for their survival). Children also develop ideas in accord with their unique propensities and personality traits (such as being naturally shy, outgoing, aggressive, inquisitive, etc.). It is these ideas that then guide our actions as we become adults, and it is these ideas you must unearth and begin to examine outside of the groups to which you belong.
Further, because humans create and maintain copious incompatible belief systems, it can be very difficult to find connection with other humans who share your belief systems to the degree that you want to be associated with them, much less trust them, much less be intimate with any one of them. This is especially true when you attempt to live outside of societies’ pathologies, rather than indiscriminately following the crowd. Most people, having uncritically accepted the belief systems of their cultures and countries, neither question the status quo nor know how to do so. Those that do question societal views, though they may be well meaning, frequently lack the critical insights required to see through and break out of the irrationalities encouraged by human societies.
Some people struggle more than others to accept the rules, institutions, customs, and taboos of their culture. They perceive themselves as not able to assimilate into society without losing their sense of identity. These people, often more insightful than those who mindlessly accept the conventional views and customs, and yet also frequently lacking critical thinking abilities and virtues, may experience mental health problems. They reject the irrational views of society but are not sure what to replace these views with. They correctly perceive the principles of society to be frequently lacking but may not know how to exchange these principles for more worthy principles. Perhaps you are one of these people.
Another key to your growth, then, is to learn to connect with others in meaningful ways while developing intellectual autonomy and achieving your potential in a sometimes brutal, sometimes fulfilling world. Another is to understand how ideas, or language, guide your reasoning.
Critical Thinking Therapy, detailed in my new book, Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness and Self-Actualization, introduces the broad toolbox of critical thinking to the mental health setting and to individuals seeking more satisfying emotional and intellectual lives. If taken seriously, this book should lead you to deep understandings about yourself and the ideas you use every day, about the world you live in, about the decisions you have made and are making, and about the consequences of those decisions; it will help you understand and face down your own irrationality, connect reasonably with others, and improve everything you desire to, and can, improve about yourself and your life.
You will need to realize that if you want to improve the quality of your life without looking for problems in your thinking and without facing unpleasant realities you are avoiding, you will inevitably either limit your potential or fail entirely. The only way to achieve your capacities is to face down your demons through disciplined self-scrutiny (but not self-punishment). Only in this way can you identify and transform your faulty assumptions and ideas. This is something your mind will try to avoid. But through routine practice in examining and reworking your thinking, you can take command of your thinking and therefore the quality of your life.
Once you have committed yourself to the practice of developing your critical thinking abilities as a vehicle toward mental well-being, you should find that you are better at intervening in your thinking with better thinking, and you should find that more satisfying emotions follow from these changes in your thinking. You will become more skilled at unearthing the thinking that guides your actions; you will learn to do so regularly, on an everyday basis, many times a day. This routine practice is required to understand the role of thinking in your life and raise the overall quality of your thoughts, feelings, and desires.
Critical Thinking Therapy will help you learn skills of deep internal reflection, so that you can better answer questions like:
To achieve your potential and experience contentment, you will need to take command of your answers to the questions above. Again, this will require you to actively work to improve your thinking every day.
Critical Thinking Therapy is for both individuals seeking more enlightening ways of living, and for therapists seeking better theoretical and practical skills for their clients. This book provides therapists with a holistic approach to therapy using the broad range of critical thinking tools. We hope this new approach to therapy will revolutionize mental health perspectives and the tools offered to clients through all forms of mental health therapies.
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Note: To our knowledge, Critical Thinking Therapy, as detailed in this book and in all its fullness, has not yet been utilized or studied in therapeutic settings. There are no schools of critical thinking therapy yet. There are no degrees specializing in critical thinking therapy. Therefore, there are no critical thinking therapists we can recommend to you. We hope this changes with this book. I hope to hear from clinicians as they use Critical Thinking Therapy.
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This blog has been excerpted (and modified) from pages xxix - xxxi and xxv of Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness and Self-Actualization, Elder, L. (2025), Treely Green Publishing Co. (www.treelygreenpublishing.com).
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