Thinking Through Questions: A Concise Invitation to Critical, Expansive, and Philosophical Inquiry

Description

Thinking Through Questions is an accessible and compact guide to the art of questioning, covering both the use and abuse of questions. Animated by wide-ranging and engaging exercises and examples, the book helps students deepen their understanding of how questions work and what questions do, and builds the skills needed to ask better questions. Co-written by two of today's leading philosopher-teachers, Thinking Through Questions is specifically designed to complement, connect, and motivate today's standard curricula, especially for classes in critical thinking, philosophical questioning, and creative problem- solving. Offering students a wide and appreciative look at questions and questioning, this small book will also appeal to faculty and students across the disciplines: in college writing courses, creativity workshops, education schools, introductions to college thinking, design thinking projects, and humanities and thinking classes. Open-ended, creative, and critically self-possessed thinking is its constant theme-what field doesn't need more of that?

Anthony Weston is Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Elon University.

"This small book holds big value for teachers of philosophy and teachers of critical thinking in any discipline. If you want your students to be more 'curious, critical, exploratory, and creative', this book will serve well as a supplementary or core text. It offers appreciation for the power of questioning, opportunities to identify types of questions, and practice in questioning skills. The authors, both recognized as master teachers, bring their own considerable pedagogical experience and engaging style to encouraging better questioning in all of us." -- Donna Engelmann, Alverno College "Highly accessible, Thinking Through Questions guides students to greater freedom regarding how, why, when, and when not to ask or answer critical, expansive, and philosophical questions. It is an especially good choice for courses where critical thinking figures prominently, both because of its content and because of the practice exercises it contains. But more fundamentally, this book leaves readers more able to resist coercive questions, reconfigure false dilemmas, question more creatively, and diagnose embedded philosophical and other assumptions. It teaches how to profitably answer questions, do valuable things with questions other than answer them, ask better questions, and liberate oneself from cognitive traps many questions set." -- David Concepcion, professor of philosophy, Ball State University " Thinking Through Questions can be put to many good uses in the classroom. Weston and Bloch-Schulman have done an admirable job of creating a text which embodies a novel approach to the numerous pedagogical situations instructors might find themselves in across the academy, especially in humanities courses and any course centered on critical reasoning and writing." Michael Gifford, Arizona State University, in Teaching Philosophy