"Everybody is a Universe in his or her own right" and the past
   being discoverable by histories and trusting the authorities who
   give us the histories while also trusting our feelings of "this
   doesn't seem right/logical/etc" - to help spark an
   investigation. Of course, the idea of questioning via skepticism
   is a part of our cultural history, so for us it becomes an
   expectation of "this is how to do things right". Our received
   cultural norms include many of the philosophies of the ancient
   greeks, melded together through the centuries and modified in
   various ways. Skepticism is a big one.* Modern versions of
   Aristotle's logic formulation is another... although that's been
   chipped away since the 19th century to include some form of the
   "middle", although his Law of Excluded Middle still dominates a
   lot of our assumptions (that there's nothing between true and
   false - it can be thrown away or negated somehow). My tendancies
   are to take the received stories (History), especially those of
   philosophies that we have received that have shaped our society
   and culture as it is today (sociocultural) - and then apply the
   best of our cognitive science if possible (discoveries in
   neurology, taking into account historical context of some of the
   assumptions of course) - and THEN consider ideas on their own
   merits if they survive. I'm perhaps a form of
   deconstructionalist / constructionalist - not really sure, or at
   the very least, in the school of skeptic.* I don't necessarily
   entirely trust empirical data, but sometimes it's the best we
   have - as long as we take into account sociocultural biases...*
   yet even more prominently I don't believe any of the methods we
   use or the ideas that we have about the nature of reality "fell
   from the sky" or are "simply obvious" or self-evident. Rather
   (going back in a circle here) - they're a product of the
   historical context they came out of and can't be divorced from
   that entirely.* Otherwise, we can easily get lost in our
   armchairs of speculation and get lost in the ether of pure
   mathematics, pure reason, pure-theology - whatever the system of
   platonic ideals happens to be.