I got this small book, written by Bertrand Russell, expecting on it some kind of description or bias towards the philosophy of language. But that has not been the case: the book covers more fundamental topics of philosophy, which is in turn a much wider topic albeit less practical. Actually "practicality" in in the book more an accident, an event, than real knowledge, even though knowledge comes from everyday life.
So that was a happy disappoinment really, since this book is a compilation of the status of philosophical thinking in the early XX century (this book was written in 1912). In this sense I enjoyed the lessons about history of philosophy (much like the Textos filosofía COU book I used in my last year in high school, that I still keep at home).
I do not recall any coverage of morality or virtue across the book, though the
word good is the last one in the last chapter. I actually kind of like that:
since I find good and evil terms difficult dangerous to be defined;
terms that, upon an attempt to be defined, would be subject to the Goodhart's
law and such
description would become invalid. Note that I'm not implying that good and
evil cannot be described, but that any description of it will and must be
confronted.
What I really enjoyed was:
Is this latter topic, about consistency, where the book hit a nerve to me. That knowlegde needs to be consistent, or if inconsistencies arise, the true knowlege requires a wider framework were the initial and the contradicting facts may fit, differentiating both cases by some kind of characteristic that makes both consistent in the new framework.
In my daily life I'm conscious of my limited knowledge and fearful of overstimating my knowledge about a topic.
This doubt/open mind comes at the risk of becoming a puppet in the hands of those that push their criteria on a topic, since one open to sistemic doubt would need to stop and consider if any new or additional information has came into play that would make that other one criteria the truth.
A quick way to obtain this knowledge is to put this new criteria to the consistency test: if we can name a seemingly inconsistent consequence of that new criteria, the presenter shall elaborate a logic reasoning towards that inconsistent, bringing into that reasoning either new or forgotten information. If the actor introducing the new criteria succeeds into solving the contradiction, one will have learned something new and its knowlege greater. Here, by the way, we can enter the realm of dialectics, where fallacies are likely to resorted to.
In short: a nice little book about philosophy (128 pages) to encourage opening our minds.