Reading about the “best thinkers” developing “a purpose in life” is not critical thinking. It’s just reading. Reading about great thinkers makes you a great thinker in the same way that reading about astronauts makes you an astronaut.
Wow, that’s incredibly naive. It is absolutely not a requirement. Critical thinking and logical reasoning are relatively basic skills. Once you learn them, reading about other people doing it just doesn’t matter for improving them.
Einstein did not read about Kierkegaard to form theories on relativity.
You’re confusing studying philosophy with critical thinking. You can think critically with a few basic logic rules and zero knowledge on existentialism.
It can't be a requirement, because at some point there was a first great thinker. That one appeared in a nominal vacuum because otherwise they wouldn't be the first.
That is categorically untrue. Evolutionary, humans are a social species. My comment is it doesn't happen in a vacuum, which is obvious to the extent that it is impossible to live in a vacuum.
A man that somehow survived being raised by wolves would be tremendously irrevocably mentally stunted. We have evolved to learn language from the people around us as children.
I’m not saying you read a biography of Marcus Aurelius, I’m saying you read Meditations. It’s basically one of the enduring blueprints for developing a plan for your life from first principles.
I did not suggest a biography. When you read Meditations, you are ‘Reading about the “best thinkers” developing “a purpose in life”’. It’s still just someone else’s blueprint for “purpose”, even if it is a good one. That doesn’t teach you how to be a great thinker.
