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Birth of Stephen Toulmin
Stephen Edelston Toulmin was in London, England in the year 1922. He was went to school at Cambridge University and received his doctorate in philosophy in 1948. Shortly after he began his teaching career in 1949 and taught at many institutions around the word, such as Oxford, University of Melbourne, NYU, Columbia, and Stanford. -
Published: Reason in Ethics
This book brought Toulmin into the eyes of the philosophical world. He believed that ethics must be used to discover good moral arguments and distinguish those arguments from weaker ones. He argued that moral philosophers should examine how ethical judgment truly works. He looked at the three approaches to the problems of ethical decisions; the objective, the subjective and the imperative. He believed all three to be incorrect. Instead, he believed scientific reasoning was needed in ethics. -
Published: The Uses of Argument
In 1959, he published his book The Uses of Argument. In this book he criticized the way philosophy traditionally handled reasoning as a matter of one-size-fits all. That inference is not timeless or universal and must be done differently depending on the data present. Traditional logic is an incomplete tool. You must realize the bigger picture before using the same reasoning for things. For example, what reasoning may have been correct for the 1900's does not necessarily work for the 2000's. -
Published: Human Understanding
In 1972, Toulmin published his book Human Understanding. In this book he challenges Thomas Kuhn's view of paradigm shifts with his own evolutionary version. However, this theory was never picked up by the greater philosophy community. -
Toulmin Receives The Jefferson Lecture in Humanities
In 1997, Toulmin became the 26th recipient of the U.S. Government's highest honor for intellectual achievement. During which, he gave a speech on "the importance of dissent." You can listen to him give this speech with the below link. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIPaGSPVrDY -
Death of Stephen Toulmin
Toulmin died of heart failure in 2009 at the age of 87. He was viewed as the founding father of argumentation theory. He invented a method for arguments, simply known at the Toulmin method. That all arguments contain six components: claim, grounds, warrants, qualifier, rebuttal, and backing. See below for a quick video explaining this method. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWnEbMZ0IaA -
Full List of Stephen Toulmin's Major Works
Toulmin, Stephen, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1950 Toulmin, Stephen, The Uses of Argument, Cambridge University Press, 1958 Toulmin, Stephen, Foresight and Understanding, Indiana University Press, 1961 Toulmin, Stephen, Human Understanding, Princeton University Press, 1972 Toulmin, Stephen, Cosmopolis, University of Chicago Press, 1990 Toulmin, Stephen, The Abuse of Casuistry, University of California Press, 1990 -
References
"Stephen Edelston Toulmin," yourdictionary.com, https://biography.yourdictionary.com/stephen-edelston-toulmin Jane. O'Grady, "Stephen Toulmin Obituary," The Guardian, 10 Jan Jan 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/jan/10/stephen-toulmin-obituary