Derek Allen is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. For many years he taught an informal logic course called Modes of Reasoning for which he wrote extensive class materials. During his career he received several teaching awards including a Leadership in Faculty Teaching Award in recognition of an “outstanding contribution to teaching excellence in Ontario” and a 3M National Teaching Fellowship Award for “an exemplary contribution to teaching and learning” in a Canadian university. He has written a number of conference papers and commentaries in argumentation studies and has published journal and anthology articles in informal logic. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Informal Logic and a past-president of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT). He has been invited by Oxford University Press to write an encyclopedia article on critical thinking and will do so with three AILACT co-authors.
Sharon Bailin, Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University and a past president of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking, has authored an extensive corpus of internationally recognized work on critical thinking and on creativity, including the award-winning book, Achieving Extraordinary Ends: An Essay on Creativity. The conception of critical thinking which Bailin co-developed has formed the foundation of major curriculum project for K- 12 schools; she has also designed and directed Masters programs on critical thinking for educators. Bailin is the author, along with Mark Battersby, of Reason in the Balance: An Inquiry Approach to Critical Thinking (2nd Ed. Hackett, 2016). Their new book, Inquiry: A New Paradigm for Critical Thinking, which describes their innovative approach to conceptualizing and teaching critical thinking, is forthcoming in Windsor Studies in Argumentation. She and Battersby are currently collaborating on CRITHINKEDU, a major European project to infuse critical thinking into higher education.
Ashley Barnett has worked on several projects funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), including the design and evaluation of critical thinking and argument mapping courses for intelligence analysts. He enjoys making free online critical thinking and argument mapping courses which can be found at ergoshmergo.com.
Mark Battersby is Professor Emeritus at Capilano University, where he taught for over 40 years. He has also taught critical thinking at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and Stanford University, and has presented numerous workshops. He was founder of the British Columbia Association for Critical Thinking Research and Instruction and led a Ministry curriculum reform initiative based on learning outcomes. He has written numerous articles on critical thinking, and is the author of Is That a Fact? (Broadview, 2nd ed., 2016), and, along with Sharon Bailin, Reason in the Balance: An Inquiry Approach to Critical Thinking (2nd ed. Hackett, 2016). Inquiry: A New Paradigm for Critical Thinking, a selection of his and Bailin’s papers on their innovative approach to critical thinking, is forthcoming from Windsor Studies in Argumentation. He and Bailin are currently collaborating on CRITHINKEDU, a major European project to infuse critical thinking into higher education.
J. Anthony Blair is a pioneer of the informal logic movement, co-authoring with Ralph H. Johnson the influential textbook Logical Self-Defense. With Robert C. Pinto and Katharine E. Parr, he wrote the critical thinking textbook, Reasoning, A Practical Guide. He is a founder and editor of the journal Informal Logic. He has published extensively in informal logic, critical thinking and argumentation. A selection of his papers appeared in his Groundwork in the Theory of Argumentation (Springer, 2012). He was appointed a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Windsor, and has received the International Society for the Study of Argumentation’s Distinguished Scholarship Award in recognition of a lifetime of scholarly achievement in the study of argumentation. He is presently a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at Windsor, which offers an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in argumentation studies.
Yiwen Dai is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication at University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include argumentation and interactions in romantic relationships. She has published in Argumentation and Advocacy and Western Journal of Communication and presented her work at national and international communication conferences.
Martin Davies is Principal Fellow in Higher Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. He received the H. J. Allen Prize in Philosophy from the University of Adelaide in 2002. His work intersects philosophy and education, in particular, researching better ways of teaching critical thinking. He has a particular interest in computer-aided argument mapping. His most recent book is the edited collection (with Ronald Barnett): The Palgaver Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education (2015).
Robert H. Ennis has long been an innovator in critical thinking. He authored Logic in Teaching, Ordinary Logic, and Critical Thinking; co-authored Evaluating Critical Thinking; and co-edited Language and Concepts in Education and Philosophy of Educational Research. He also co-authored the two Cornell Critical Thinking Tests (Level X and Level Z) and several other critical thinking tests. He has over seventy publications dealing with critical thinking, nine of which were co-authored or co-edited. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of Education at the University of Illinois, was Professor of Philosophy of Education at Cornell University, was a high school science teacher, and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He received awards from the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation, the Network to Improve Thinking and Learning, the Sixth International Conference on Thinking, and the American Association of Philosophy Teachers.
Alec Fisher pioneered the development of critical thinking in the UK. He taught philosophy, logic and critical thinking in the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, where he was Director of the Centre for Research in Critical Thinking. He has conducted workshops on critical thinking in Britain, Europe. North America, South America, South Africa, Russia, and the Far East. He designed the AS level examination in Critical Thinking for OCR in the UK and was Chief Examiner for some years. His books include The Logic of Real Arguments (Cambridge University Press, 1988 and 2004), Critical Thinking; Its Definition and Assessment (Centre for Research in Critical Thinking and Edgepress 1997, co-authored with Michael Scriven) and Critical Thinking: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2001 and 2011). He recently completed (with Michael Scriven and Robert Ennis) a report for the (US) Law School Admission Council, recommending changes to the Law School Admission Test.
Tim van Gelder is a Melbourne Enterprise Fellow in the School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a Principal Investigator on the SWARM Project, a major effort to develop a cloud platform for collaborative analytical reasoning. He has contributed to the development of argument mapping tools and methods and research on the impact of their use on the development of critical thinking skills. His work has been funded by the Australian Research Council, including a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship, and (currently) by IARPA, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. In addition to his academic activities he has considerable experience providing consulting and training services to large public and private sector organisations in areas such as reasoning, estimation, and decision making. He also keeps bees.
G.C. Goddu has published extensively on the foundations of argumentation theory for the past twenty years. He is on the editorial board of the journal Informal Logic and is a two-time winner (2007, 2010) of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking’s annual essay prize. He is currently the James Thomas Professor of Philosophy at the University of Richmond.
Dale Hample has been publishing research on argumentation since the 1970s. He has written two advanced books on argumentation, Arguing: Exchanging Reasons Face to Face (2005) and Interpersonal Arguing 2018), and with William and Pamela Benoit has co-edited a book of essays, Readings in Argumentation (1992). He has published about 150 journal articles and book chapters. His discipline is Communication, which has led him to integrate quantitative social science with the humanistic traditions of rhetorical theory. He has given keynote addresses at argumentation conferences in the U.S., Canada, Chile, and the Netherlands. He is an Emeritus Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland.
David Hitchcock is emeritus professor of philosophy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, where he taught service courses in critical thinking over a span of 40 years. He is the author of Critical Thinking: A Guide to Evaluating Information (Methuen, 1983) and co-author with Milos Jenicek, MD, of Evidence-Based Practice: Logic and Critical Thinking in Medicine (AMA Press, 2005). He co-edited with Bart Verheij Arguing on the Toulmin Model: New Essays in Argument Analysis and Evaluation (Springer, 2007). His On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking (Springer, 2017) brings together 25 previously published sole-authored articles, along with seven new chapters updating his views on their topics: deduction, induction and conduction; material consequence; patterns of reasoning; interpersonal discussion; evaluation of reasoning; fallacies; and informal logic and critical thinking. He is the author of the entry on critical thinking in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
Beth Innocenti has authored numerous essays on contemporary and historical argumentation theory and the entry “Argumentation” in Oxford Bibliographies in Communication. Her research has been published in journals such as Argumentation, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and Journal of Communication, and explains how social actors design speech acts and strategies—such as demanding, using humor, and making fear appeals—to influence addressees as openly intended. She has also published accounts of historical theories of argument proffered by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers on rhetoric. She serves on the editorial boards of Argumentation and Advocacy and Philosophy of Rhetoric. She is currently Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas and has served as Department Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, and Director of Undergraduate Studies. The department houses faculty and graduate students who coach one of the best collegiate debate teams in the United States.
Sally Jackson is best known for her work on naturally occurring argumentation, an area of research opened by her collaborative work with Scott Jacobs. Her writings (mostly notably her co-authored book Reconstructing Argumentative Discussion and her early articles on conversational argument) have been recognized with multiple awards from the (US) National Communication Association and the American Forensic Association. In 1997 she received the Distinguished Research Award from the International Society for the Study of Argumentation for career achievement. She is currently Professor of Communication and Informatics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has also held professorial appointments at the University of Nebraska, Michigan State University, Oklahoma University, and the University of Arizona. She served as Chief Information Officer at both the University of Arizona and the University of Illinois, assuming assumed responsibility for each institution’s communication technology strategy during the rise of the Worldwide Web.
Justine Kingsbury is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, and currently Associate Dean (Postgraduate), in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. She has taught critical thinking in a wide variety of formats, and has published on virtue argumentation theory and on thinking critically about deeply held beliefs (with Tracy Bowell) and on the burden of proof (with Tim Dare), as well as on various topics in metaphilosophy and in philosophy of mind.
Jan Albert van Laar is researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). After having defended his dissertation “The dialectic of ambiguity” he worked as a postdoc researcher on argumentative confrontations from a pragma-dialectical stance at the Department of speech communication, argumentation theory and rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam. With Erik C. W. Krabbe he published a series of articles on argumentative criticism and on the role of argument in negotiation. He developed the educational software package “Middle Ground” for training in and reflection on compromise formation. Presently, he publishes and teaches about: argumentation, compromise, dialogue types, deliberation, fallacies, philosophy of argument and public controversy.
Michael Scriven was born in the United Kingdom, went to Australia from age 12 through a BA & MA at Melbourne in honors math. Returning to Oxford, he received a D.Phil in philosophy (thesis on explanation theory). He then held appointments (about four years each) at Minnesota, Swarthmore and Indiana; did summer teaching at Wesleyan and Harvard; did research in primatology in Austria; and two Institutions for Advance Study (on democracy and on the behavioral sciences). Next he spent 12 years at Berkeley, with eventually a split appointment between philosophy and education. He left UCB to start an institution for evaluation research at the University of San Francisco; ran an evaluation consulting business; was a Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University; served was co-head of the School of Education at the University of Western Australia for twelve years; now back at Claremont as co-director of the Claremont Evaluation Center.
Christopher W. Tindale is Director of the Centre of Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, where he is also co-editor of Informal Logic and the book series Windsor Studies in Argumentation. His textbook authorship includes Good Reasoning Matters (with Groarke, 5th edition, Oxford 2013) and Fallacies and Argument Appraisal (Cambridge 2007). He is the author of many papers in argumentation theory, and his most recent books include Reason’s Dark Champions (USC Press 2010), The Philosophy of Argument and Audience Reception (Cambridge 2015), and a series of essays in Spanish, Retórica y teoría de la argumentación contemporáneas: ensayos escogidos de Christopher Tindale (EAFIT 2017).
Douglas Walton (Ph.D. University of Toronto, 1972) is Distinguished Research Fellow of CRRAR (Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric) at the University of Windsor. During 2008-2013 held the Assumption Chair of Argumentation Studies at UWindsor. He has been Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, University of Arizona, and University of Lugano (Switzerland). In 2009 he was given the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Dean’s Special Recognition Award of the University of Windsor, in recognition of excellence in research, scholarship and creative activity. In the area of argumentation studies he has published 50 books, as well as 350+ refereed papers, and has had 20,472 citations of his writings as of June 20, 2018 (Google Scholar). He has been invited to act as keynote speaker in 2019 for the Munich Winter School ‘Scientific Reasoning and Argumentation’ hosted by the International Doctoral School at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.
John Woods has done foundational work in several branches of philosophy. He is co-founder of the Woods–Walton Approach to fallacies theory, an early pioneer of the formal semantics of literary discourse and of conflict-resolution methods for the non-empirical sciences. His historical investigations have prompted the reconsideration of the structural importance for dialogue logic of Aristotle’s “immature” writings in The Organon. In collaboration with Dov Gabbay, the logic of relevance went causal, and abduction was framed as ignorance-preserving reasoning. More recently, Woods has generalized the causal aspects of relevance to a naturalized logic of inference and legal reasoning. A new book on fiction abandons formal semantics in favour of a naturalized logic of reference and truth. Woods is the recipient of national and international awards and honorary degrees. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1990, he is currently Director of the Abductive Systems Group at UBC.
