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published on August 12, 2016
M. Gregory Oakes
Understanding Understanding
How to Think and Write Clearly
Drawing on the basic philosophy of mind of the modern period, I offer a means of improving clarity of student written thought. Clarity of thought entails the sort of concept-sensation synthesis central to Kant’s account of human experience: or in more recent terminology, to be clear is to recognize the intention of a concept in a member of its extension. Simple analysis of concepts and of the mental state of understanding reveals structures that can help diagnose and repair conceptual weakness. I describe my means of teaching this method in an introduction to philosophy course.