The book actually began as a ‘critical thinking’ course at the University of Edinburgh. However, having done research on the history of ‘critical thinking’, I took a different approach to the topic.Basically, what happened in the twentieth century is that ‘critical thinking’ became increasingly about getting it right. It did this by focusing on the logical fallacies that we make, and on the biases that we have, which lead us to get it wrong. I didn’t want to do that because I don’t think that’s the best approach. After all, if we want to make sense of what people say in the real world – outside the philosophy classroom - logic only gets us so far. And, while we all have biases, how can we know when they lead us to get it wrong? We would need to know the truth. But that’s often what we’re arguing about. The result is what we see all the time. People disagree about what’s true and accuse each other of bias.So, in the course, rather than focus on getting it right, I focused on what, I think, critical thinking should be: thinking about the process, not the outcome, of our thoughts. In other words, whatever you think, it’s not about where you end up. It’s about how you get there. We often end up in different places, but we get there through a similar process. It always depends on what we notice, on how we interpret it, and so on. And since, to make more sense of the world, we need to be more curious about how we see the world, I used intriguing stuff - quirky history, stories, and even magic tricks - to get students curious about how we make sense of the world.As you might imagine, the course was very popular, but that was in late 2019. Then COVID happened and I couldn’t teach the course. That’s when I decided to turn it into a book.