How do you know you’re awake right now? You’re reading this, so of course you’re awake. Still, though. How do you know you’re not dreaming?

Philosopher René Descartes posed this challenge back in the 1600s to make sure he had a solid foundation of knowledge and to throw out anything he didn’t know with absolute certainty. But, he wondered, can we even trust our senses? What if we’re just dreaming right now? The catch was clear: there is no test you could devise to prove that you’re not dreaming, because you could always be dreaming that you passed the test.

I’m an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and this is a fun little game we play in introductory philosophy classes. I use a twist with my students, though. I start by asking them why they believe what I say. “Because you have a Ph.D.!” they reply. “Cool. How do you know?” Eventually, after many false starts, they land somewhere around “Well, UAB hired you, so you must know what you’re doing.” I ask if that’s what they write on every instructor evaluation. (Spoiler: it’s not.)

My goal in this game is not to undermine their faith in the academic community to which they’ve committed their mind, energy, and finances. Quite the contrary. My goal is to challenge them to engage with that community, to dig in, to get what they came for. It’s like Descartes’ dream trick: I want them to think about what they believe and why they believe it. After a while, students admit they don’t know why they trust me. This might seem worrying, but in fact it’s nothing short of inspiring. See, they don’t know it yet, but they’ve just arrived at the starting point of meaningful conversation. In fact, it’s the required starting point in philosophy. They’ve just said, “I don’t know.”

Philosophy is an activity, a thing one does, a style of thinking. It takes a ton of practice. As researchers, we’re trying to figure out what we should believe and do. As teachers, we’re trying to help students do the same thing.

One reason it takes so much practice is that the entire project is fundamentally countercultural. Think about any other type of debate. The goal is to win. You start with your conclusion, you defend it to the bitter end, and you earn bonus points for crushing the other side along the way. In philosophy, the goal is to figure out what is right. We don’t start with the conclusion and plug in reasons until the debate moderator cuts our mic. We start with reasons and see where they lead.

Rule #1 in philosophy: humility. We want to find the right answer and know we may not already have it, so we have to listen to others. Importantly, we have to try to understand their reasons for disagreeing with us. Rule #2: charity. Our goal is not to prove our own intellectual or moral superiority; it’s just to figure out hard things together. With this shared goal in mind, we work through hard, important questions together.

Lest any of this seem overly idealistic and ivory-tower-ish, it’s worth noting that a 2020 report from Project Lead the Way and Burning Glass Technologies identified the following skills as “most demanded” by employers: problem solving, critical and creative thinking, communication, collaboration, and ethical and moral reasoning. So, contrary to every philosophy joke ever, philosophy cultivates the exact skills the paid labor market wants!

But it’s so much more than that. Imagine a world where we begin with humility, charity, and a shared goal of figuring it out together, and then–through dialogue, in community with one another–we ask how we should live. Told you: nothing short of inspiring.