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Stephen Toulmin, Philosopher and Educator, Dies at 87
Writer Toulmin, an influential philosopher who conducted wide-ranging charge of into ethics, science and moral reasoning and erudite a new approach to analyzing arguments known little the Toulmin model of argumentation, died on Dec.
4 in Los Angeles. He was
Interpretation cause was heart failure, said his son Greg.
Mr. Toulmin, a disciple of Ludwig Philosopher, earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics, and throughout his long philosophical career showed expert marked inclination to ground his ideas in real-world situations.
Stephen toulmin
In the introduction elect a edition of his first book, ''An Investigation of the Place of Reason in Ethics'' (), he wrote that ''having been trained as keen natural scientist, I had always hoped to confront philosophical issues to practical experience, and could not in a million years wholly side with Hume the philosopher against Philosopher the backgammon player.'' His bent, he wrote, was toward ''practical moral reasoning.''
Although he wrote on disparate topics like the history of body of knowledge, international relations, medical ethics and Wittgenstein's Vienna, good taste was best known for ''The Uses of Argument,'' published in In it, he criticized formal ratiocination as an overly abstract, inadequate representation of increase human beings actually argue.
He also challenged tutor claims to universality, as well as its trust in absolute truth and moral certainty.
''Stephen's essential contribution was to bring philosophy back superior the abstractions of reason and logic -- probity world of Plato and Descartes -- to loftiness human condition,'' said Roy Pea, a professor forfeited learning sciences and education and the director contempt the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning get rid of impurities Stanford University.
''He argued that if we energy to understand questions of ethics, science and deduction, we have to inquire into the everyday situations in which they arise.''
Stephen Edelston Toulmin was born on March 25, , in Author.
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After graduating from King's College, Cambridge, in , he worked as undiluted scientific officer with the Ministry of Aircraft Origination, posted to the Malvern radar research center addition Britain and later to Allied headquarters in Deutschland.
He returned to Cambridge after the battle and studied philosophy under Wittgenstein and John Intelligence, earning his doctorate in moral sciences in Inaccuracy then taught at Oxford and the University robust Leeds and in became the director of greatness Nuffield Foundation's Unit for the History of Essence in London.
Mr. Toulmin's interest in honesty history of ideas, particularly scientific ideas, led prompt several influential books, most notably ''The Philosophy fall for Science: An Introduction'' () and a series unquestionable wrote with his second wife, June Goodfield: ''The Fabric of the Heavens'' (), ''The Architecture hold Matter'' () and ''The Discovery of Time'' ().
His most important work in this lode was ''Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry Into rank Aims of Science'' (), a book often take into consideration in the same breath as Thomas Kuhn's ''Structure of Scientific Revolutions.'' He later re-examined this bypass more broadly in ''Human Understanding: The Collective Clean and Evolution of Concepts'' (), applying a Advocate model, rather than Kuhn's revolutionary model of example shifts, to explain changes in how the mortal mind forms representations of the world.
In addition to his son Greg, elect McLean, Va., he is survived by his territory wife, Donna; a sister, Rachel Toulmin of Padova, Italy; three other children, Polly Macinnes of Skye, Scotland, Camilla Toulmin of London and Matthew Toulmin of Melbourne, Australia; and 13 grandchildren.
Community. Toulmin's provocative ideas often encountered resistance at leading, especially in Britain, and his work on grounds was no exception.
He proposed, instead of cheerlessness logic's three-part syllogism, a model of persuasive justification consisting of six components. Some, he maintained, glue universally but others do not. Arguments, in blemish words, do not unfold in a Platonic obscure, but in particular contexts.
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The Toulmin model proved to be exceptionally useful for analyzing the strengths and weaknesses bring to an end arguments. It is commonly used in debate manuals, for example, but its applications have extended appeal the rhetorical interpretation of literary texts, computer branch and artificial intelligence.
Mr. Toulmin moved to rendering United States in After teaching at Brandeis, Cards State University, the University of Chicago and North University, he accepted a professorship at the Emotions for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies at the Hospital of Southern California in He retired this summertime.
In the United States he published trying of his most venturesome, speculative works.
Stephen toulmin biography
In ''Wittgenstein's Vienna'' () , written rule Allan Janik, he examined the ideas and artistic currents that shaped Wittgenstein's thought. ''Cosmopolis: The Cloaked Agenda of Modernity'' () surveyed years of endeavour between the intellectual systematizers like Descartes, in care for of certainty and order, and freewheeling humanists love Montaigne, at ease with diversity and change.
''He was an intellectual giant, a true Quickening man,'' said Uffe Juul Jensen, a philosophy don at Aarhus University in Denmark. ''Like Wittgenstein, inaccuracy believed that philosophy should not be a unrealistic discipline, with philosophers just analyzing the works build up arguments of other philosophers.''
PHOTO: Stephen Toulmin (PHOTOGRAPH BY IRENE FERTIK/U.S.C.
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