The common conception of philosophy as a pursuit envisions a sewing circle of effete intellectuals spouting personal opinions over why one brand of mystical relativism is better than the prior. Berets are worn, and everyone dresses in black.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Philosophy is the scientific method abstracted and purified, a winnowing of thoughts and knowledge in a continuous conversation about what we are and what this is. Both pursuits have their roots in religion, the original attempt at explanation of the mysterious. Both have moved far beyond the brick walls and power restrictions of religious dogma.

A little philosophy goes a long way, and in The Philosopher's Toolkit, authors Julian Baggini and Peter Fosl spread out a ton of the good stuff in a mere 221 pages. Everything is presented in clear, modern language, meticulously cross-referenced and without emphasis on dead white guys. One method rolls naturally to the next as thoughts gather steam and the "Aha!" moments build.

Concepts covered include deduction and induction, axioms and tautologies. There are entries for dialectic and reduction, circularity, horned dilemmas, Hume's Fork and Ockham's Razor. It gets better moving into analytic and synthetic, entailment and implication, syntax and semantics, critique. The fun really starts when the authors tackle Gödel and incompleteness, possibility, impossibility and self-evident truths.

The terms above are not used in the course of most daily lives, to our detriment. It feels good to think clearly, and the energy expended in the pursuit of honest, authentic interaction with the world is rewarded a thousand times over by a life well-lived as what you really are: a human being, right here, right now.

While this book places a profound collection of conceptual tools before you, the effect this fast-paced, well-written, truly easy-to-use guide to higher rational thought will have on your daily life is the real prize for reading, re-reading and referencing again. As you read, the way you operate in the world changes. If people would cruise through this tome rather than embrace unprovable assertions to make the unknown less scary, we might live in a world vastly changed for the better.

From the entry on Mystical Experience and Revelation:

"Mystical experience is unreliable because it is almost always private, personal and impossible for others to test or scrutinize. Individual personal experience has proven time and again an unreliable basis for knowledge. One of the most important dimensions of establishing knowledge about matters of fact has been corroborations through testing and subjecting knowledge claims to the scrutiny of others. Mystical experience seems impossible to correct or check in this way, but without this sort of disciplining literally anything goes."