Wednesday Workshop 6: Developing Your Philosophy

Wednesday Workshop 6: Developing Your Philosophy

Philosophy is the tool for confronting yourself, making clearer judgments, and moving through life with purpose. The practical steps for building one are: 

 

Read – classic and contemporary texts (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Camus, Judith Butler, and others).

Discuss – talk it out with others to sharpen your thinking.

Identify – name your core values in clear, logical statements.

Examine – test them against ethical dilemmas.

Connect – break complex ideas into parts and find the links that make them coherent.

Apply – use the work of other thinkers when you need guidance.

Reflect – look at your own patterns and decide what stays, what changes, and how you will maintain it.

Ask questions – stay curious, challenge assumptions, and follow the useful questions that appear.

These steps rest on the same ground we have already covered: reality is objective, reason is the primary tool, contradictions must be resolved, and any remaining limits (the kind Camus pointed out) are to be faced curiously. 



Guided exercise (20–25 minutes at home)

Open a blank page. Write 4–6 short statements that currently make up the working core of your philosophy and the principles you actually try to live by.

  1. Choose one gap: an area where those statements feel incomplete, vague, or untested. Write the gap in one plain sentence.

  2. Develop the rationale using the chapter steps:
    • Identify the values at stake and state them logically.
    • Examine one concrete ethical or practical dilemma that touches the gap. Write how you would respond and why.
    • Connect the new idea to your existing statements—look for the underlying concepts that hold them together or expose a contradiction.
    • Apply one relevant thinker from the list (Rand on reason and reality, Camus on the absurd, Popper on falsifiability, Sartre on freedom and responsibility, or any other that fits). Note the specific insight you are borrowing and how it strengthens or revises your position.
    • Reflect on the pattern this reveals in your own experience. What stays? What must change?

  3. Write the full chain of reasoning that produced the new or revised principle. Keep only what survives evidence, logic, and the test of identity. Note any remaining limit without filling it.

Create an encompassed screenshot

On a fresh page, produce a single compact overview of your philosophy as it stands right now:


Essence (2–3 sentences): Your fundamental orientation toward reality, knowledge, and human life. 

Core principles (5–7 bullets): The statements that survived the process above, including the new or revised one.

Key rationale (one short paragraph): The main chain of evidence and logic that holds the whole together, plus a plain acknowledgment of any unresolved limit.

This page is your current full snapshot with an essence, structure, and the reasoning that produced it. Keep it. The next time you return to the work, begin from this page. If you want to go deeper later, use The Secular Occultist's Handbook of Physicalist Magick as a guide.
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