John Anthony (Tony) Blair retired in 2006 as a Distinguished University Professor after 39 years in the UW philosophy department. He was born in Ottawa (12 August 1941), attended public elementary and high schools there, and attended McGill, playing on championship intercollegiate football and ski teams and taking honours philosophy. After three years of philosophy doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, he was hired in 1967 at Windsor and gradually progressed from lecturer to full professor by 1987.
Blair taught intro. to ethics, applied ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and law punishment & morality throughout his career. In 1972 he started collaborating with Ralph Johnson on a new kind of logic course and by 1977 they’d written a textbook for it, Logical Self-Defense. Blair taught reasoning skills, informal logic and argument theory as well during the rest of his career. Students complained of the hours spent analyzing and assessing arguments—yet they found the challenge absorbing.
In 1978 Blair and Johnson organized the first of three Windsor informal logic conferences and started a newsletter that in 1984 became the journal Informal Logic. It’s still going. At that first conference one invited speaker, an eccentric hypochondriac from York, arrived with shovel handle for spreading ointments on his back. Billeted in Electa Hall, he saw the button in the doorhandle of his room pushed in and leapt to the “hasty conclusion” that he was locked in. He tried to open the window to call out but pulled it from the wrong side. Panicking, he smashed the window with the shovel handle and screamed for help. Somebody called the fire department. Arts Dean Eugene Malley generously covered the cost of repairs.
Always active in departmental life, Blair started the “Dry Run” series for faculty to try out scholarly papers, and published “Course Description Booklets” giving details of the year’s course contents and requirements. To stem enrolment declines he helped design a handful of new “popular” philosophy course. He proposed “Philosophy & Sex” but fuddy-duddies renamed it “Philosophy & Sexuality.” Still, students enrolled in numbers, only to be ambushed by the required readings: closely-argued journal articles by professional philosophers—and yet most toughed out the demanding course.
In the mid 1990s and the early 2000s Blair served terms as department head. He developed a course cycling system making every course available at least once every three years and a scheduling system that removed all conflicts for philosophy majors. At one point, due to deaths and retirements, the department had shrunk to four permanent faculty and the majority on the hiring committee were from other departments. The leading candidate was Marcello Guarini, but the outsiders accused Blair of nepotism since Guarini got his BA in philosophy from UW. Only by stressing that Western University, where he got his Ph.D., said Guarini was one of the best doctoral students they’d ever had, did Blair get approval to hire him.
Blair is especially proud of the prize in his name for an outstanding student paper at each Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation conference. He also notes the achievements of several of his students: Bradley Bowen, Charles Jones, Augustine Frimpong-Mansoh, Janet Sobocan, Takuzo Konishi, Linda Carozza and Patrick Bondy went on to get their PhDs; Kevin Fanick and Amy Ohler their LLBs.
Blair was born in Ottawa, went to public elementary and high schools there, and attended McGill, playing on championship intercollegiate football and ski teams and taking honours philosophy.
After three years of philosophy doctoral studies at Michigan, he was hired in 1967 at Windsor and gradually progressed from lecturer to full professor in 1987. He taught courses in his areas of specialization (ethics and political philosophy)—plus the philosophy of education; law, punishment and morality; and reasoning skills—throughout his career at Windsor. In 1972 he started collaborating with Ralph Johnson on a new kind of logic course (later called “informal logic”) and by 1977 they’d written a textbook for it, Logical Self-Defense. In 1978 they organized the first of three Windsor conferences on informal logic and started a newsletter which, in 1984, became Informal Logic, a full-fledged blind-refereed academic journal, now in its 36th volume.
While developing a research interest in informal logic and argumentation theory, Blair was active in departmental life. He started the “Dry Run” series for philosophy faculty to try out scholarly papers and published free “Course Description Booklets” that described that year’s course contents and requirements in detail. To stem philosophy enrolment declines he helped design a handful of new “popular” courses in philosophy applied to the culture: e.g., “Phil. & Sexuality,” “Phil. of Rock,” “Applied Ethics” and courses related to other programs: “Law, Punishment & Morality” (Criminology) and “Reasoning Skills,” (originally for Business). With Robert Pinto he wrote the textbook, Reasoning Skills, in 1993 (Kate Parr contributed to the Canadian edition).
His research in the 1980s was split between the theory and practice of critical thinking instruction with colleagues in the U.S. and argumentation theory with colleagues in the U.S. and in Europe. From 1985 to 2006 he was a board member of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation based at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, which has held a big conference every four years since 1986 and bestows an annual award for a record of outstanding scholarship.
In the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, he served terms as department head. He developed a course cycling system making every philosophy course available at least once every three years and a scheduling system that removed all conflicts for philosophy majors. During his tenure departments were required to produce a 5-year plan, and the philosophy plan was hailed across the university as exemplary.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he helped the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation run conferences every two years, almost all of them at Windsor. His colleagues created a prize in his name for an outstanding student paper at each OSSA conference. He reports pride that his students. Bradley Bowen, Charles Jones, Augustine Frimpong-Mansoh, Jan Sobocan, Takuzo Konishi, Linda Carozza and Patrick Bondy went on to get their PhDs; Kevin Fanick and Amy Ohler their LLBs.
In 2002 he was named a Distinguish University Professor. When forced by Ontario statute to retire in 2006 he created the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric and recruited Ralph Johnson to serve with him as founding co-chair. He received the 2012 ISSA award for lifetime achievement in argumentation studies and, in Groundwork in the Theory of Argumentation, published a selection of 23 of more than 120 published papers.