 To become a philosopher, you only need to ask one question. Why? When you receive an answer, ask the same question again. You'll quickly get into some very deep and abstract ideas. And you'll quickly annoy whoever you're talking with. Most people don't think about the reasons for their beliefs. They don't understand that our conclusions about the world are periphery. They are at the very end of our thought processes. If a worldview were like a tree, our conclusions would be the leaves. A tree's leaves don't grow in thin air. They're attached to branches. And the same is true of our ideas. Conclusions aren't derived from nothing. They are stuck to a deeper set of beliefs. But the branches of a tree do not float by themselves either. They are attached to a trunk, which is then attached to its roots. Without the roots, there's no trunk and certainly no leaves. Our ideas work the same way. Every conclusion is tied to a long chain of deeper premises. And asking why takes you from the leaves to the branches, then to the trunk, then to the roots. And this is the practice of philosophy. Most people are only focused on their leaves, but today I am going to the roots. Not just of my own worldview, but of everybody's. Contrary to what you might think, a long string of why questions can actually have a final answer. We can arrive at a foundational conclusion, a bedrock for our worldview. The foundation is logic. And the reason is inescapable necessity. All propositions, regardless of their content, presuppose logical constraints. And these constraints are not optional. They're not hypothetical. They are necessary. Let me give you an example. Take the sentence, There is no married bachelor. This proposition isn't just true. It's necessarily true. In no circumstance, in no possible universe, could there ever be a married bachelor. The concepts of being married and being a bachelor, in other words, not being married, are mutually exclusive. This is not a hypothetical statement. We don't need to go out and test whether or not there are actually married bachelors somewhere in the universe. We can know simply by understanding the meaning of our concepts that there cannot be married bachelors. Here's another example. There is no object which has only six sides and only seven sides at the same time. Again, this isn't a hypothesis. You can know it's true with certainty. We don't need to think, well, perhaps if I searched underwater or in another galaxy, you will never find such an object because you cannot. By definition, it's impossible for anything to possess mutually exclusive properties. Otherwise those properties wouldn't be mutually exclusive. This is the nature of logical necessity, and there are countless other examples. Logic is the secret to all critical thinking. It's the root of every philosophical tree. It's presupposed by every sentence and every thought. Even by doubting the laws of logic, you've affirmed them as thinking that something might be false presupposes that there's such a thing as true and false in the first place. Not even radical skepticism can defeat an idea that it presupposes. This brings up the ultimate question. Why is logic necessary? Now the answer represents the very bottom of my world view. For better or worse, my mind can't go any deeper. I do not know any more fundamental truth than this. Logic and existence are inseparable. I will illustrate and rephrase this several ways. The idea is important enough to risk being repetitive. Here's what I mean. In all instances of existence, you find existence. And to the extent that something exists, it is necessarily false to claim that it does not exist. There is no case of existence which is non-existence. Nothing exists which does not exist. Now this applies to everything which is and everything which could possibly be. Something cannot not be the way that it is because if it weren't that way, it wouldn't be that way. If something is, regardless of what it is, then it is. And it would be false to claim that it is not. Therefore, truth and falsehood are inescapable categories for all of existence. Now for the philosophers reading this, I am claiming that at the very bottom of everything, epistemology and metaphysics blend together. We know knowledge because existence exists. All knowledge presupposes logical rules and those rules are objectively inescapable because of the nature of reality. In other words, that it is. This is bedrock as far as I can tell. There's no running from it. There's no transcending it. There is quite literally no possible escape from logic. You can verbally deny it, but only if you want to reveal your own foolishness. Like a man insisting, it is impossible to attempt communication. The only thing to which logic does not apply is nothing because it's not anything. If you understand this, you'll understand why I'll simply never be convinced otherwise. It's not pigheadedness. It's because in order for these beliefs to be wrong, it requires them to be wrong, which imply that wrong and not wrong are meaningful categories and therefore logic is again inescapable. You can know with certainty that you're never going to hear a sound argument against logic for the same reason you'll never hear a silent sound. It's necessity. The implications of logical necessity do not end with vague propositions like a thing is a thing. Instead logic applies to every sentence in every area of thought, regardless of how abstract or concrete. This allows the philosopher to state with utter certainty that in any field of thought propositions which entail logical contradictions are necessarily false. This is equally true from economics to gender studies to quantum physics. It also allows us to develop a method for thinking. Propositions do not exist in vacuums. Each one has presuppositions and implications. So everything to which logically follows from any true premises is also true and any idea which presupposes or implies a logical error must be false. And therefore it should be no surprise that paradoxes don't actually exist in reality. Navigating through the world of ideas is very similar to navigating through a dense jungle and logic is your perfectly sharp machete. So at the bottom of everything there is an immovable foundation. No deeper truth exists and methodologically speaking no truth is more important. It is essential to my worldview and to yours regardless of whether it's acknowledged or understood. To grasp the inescapability of logic and the reason for it is to grasp the most fundamental truth of the universe. Check out stevedashpatterson.com