Monograph traces development of philosophical field

UWindsor professor emeritus Ralph Johnson’s essay collection, The Rise of Informal Logic, has become the second volume in the Windsor Studies in Argumentation open access monograph series.

First published in print by Vale Press in 1996, the work is now available as an electronic edition in PDF, EPUB and Kindle formats with minor corrections.

Windsor Studies in Argumentation decided to republish the book to make a compelling account of the formation of informal logic as a discipline available to a broad audience, says philosophy professor Chris Tindale, an editor in chief of the monograph series.

“Written by one of the founders of the field, The Rise of Informal Logic includes essential chapters on the history and development of informal logic,” Dr. Tindale says. “Other chapters in the collection are key reflections on the theoretical issues raised by the attempt to understand informal argument.”

Dr. Johnson retired in 2006 after 39 years as a UWindsor professor. In 1971, he and his colleague, J. Anthony Blair, developed an approach to reasoning they called informal logic and published their text Logical Self-Defense in 1976. In 1979, Johnson and Blair founded the Informal Logic Newsletter, which became the journal Informal Logic in 1985.

Windsor Studies in Argumentation is one of the first monograph series in the world launched on the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Monograph Press software. The first volume in the series, What do we Know About the World? Rhetorical and Argumentative Perspectives, was recently featured as the unglue.it project’s Creative Commons book of the day. Its edition of The Rise of Informal Logic is available through its online catalogue.

To learn more about open monograph publishing, contact Dave Johnston, administrator of Scholarship at UWindsor for the Leddy Library, at djohnst@uwindsor.ca.