Colin Patrick

In my view philosophy is not only a body of written work but primarily the practice of carefully, honestly, and systematically interrogating settled assumptions about ourselves, our history, and our natural and social world. I think the value of these things is often overlooked and even downplayed in our information-saturated culture, leaving us feeling overwhelmed and somewhat hesitant and disempowered to do our own thinking, encouraged to trust what we hear and read from those with the biggest platforms or loudest voices, and otherwise leave critical thinking to the “experts.”

In my courses I seek more than anything to empower students to push back against this, to be confident in their capacity to recognize arguments and inferences when they come across them, to build confidence in their ability to critically appraise them, to be able to draw out the logical implications of viewpoints and arguments - especially those that they’re under any kind of pressure to accept as “common sense,” and to construct inferences and arguments of their own.