Philosophical Methods
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Philosophers try to know the nature of things by using some of the following techniques:
- Defining terms
- Questioning presuppositions
- Distinguishing senses
- Discovering entailments
- Fitting principles to cases
- Discovering ignorance
- Discovering limits of knowledge
- Theorizing from conceptual considerations
- Theorizing from current and new knowledge
- Maintaining logical consistency / searching out inconsistency
- Acknowledging logical possibility
- Fundamental focus on argument
- Searching for counter-examples
- Searching for necessity
- Using thought experiments
- Looking carefully at phenomena
- Dialectic -- logic in process....
