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....