Define philosophy? explain your philosophical biases and touchstones. Your philosophical biases and touchstones are your sources and criteria that inform you about the truth of reality, about wisdom or knowledge, about what is genuinely valuable in life. Such touchstones might be books, people, scientific methods or discoveries, religions, personal experience, etc. It might be just good old fashioned honest curiosity: Why are things way they are? And are things really the way they seem to be?