• Doing research takes various skills:

identifying questions, developing models, providing theorems, finding data, expositing results. Because few economists excel at all these tasks, collaborating authors can together do things that each author could not do as easily on his own.

• The lecturer’s ideas are tested and challenged
• The test of the professor’s efficacy is less the amount of information memorized by the student than the degree to which the student is infected or seduced by the words, gaze, and dance of the professor, the degree to which the student too comes to embody the questions that the professor is asking and the passion to come up with answers of his or her own.
• decisions on moral philosophy (ethics), political philosophy, philosophy on science (anthropology), philosophy of aesthetics and materialism, epistemology (study of what is right and questioning knowledge), metaphysics - what is freedom, what are the possible consequences (individual choice or considering civil duty), contemplates how change is possible, philosophy of mind (how the mind works)
• distinguish different kinds of necessity, e.g. logical necessity (exemplified by ANALYTIC truths), causal necessity, physical necessity, psychological necessity, metaphysical necessity moral necessity.
• authenticate your own beliefs by theorizing the statements, events and conditions
• testing arguments and explaining clearly the principle behind the argument and how it was tested
• "the trivial, the formal, the methodological, the purely theoretical, the remotely historical—in short, the politically irrelevant
• Try to make the right decisions and have courage in your moral convictions. distance yourself from your habits of thoughts and convictions to see other people's views.
• But the student who uses scholarship and words to resist the authoritarianism and the injustice of senescent power gets an A for the lessons of Harvard College. In fact, they are the new fruits of knowledge fertilized by the old fallen leaves; they are the seeds of the persistent refinement of scholarship across the generations.
• mentors help as they use emperical and policy-oriented knowledge. emperical- a characteristic of science, meaning that the ultimate test of truth of a proposition requires the gathering of data and letting the facts decide. This is in contrast to common sense, authority, or repetition (memorization) as methods of fixing beliefs. they help me understand philosophy of science in ways of the formation, structure, and evolution of scientific communities.
• parents and mentors guide your personal and professional outlook and passion. Here the approach to the philosophy of science is to study how scientific communities actually operate.