Critical and Creative Thinking
Here’s a collection of mostly textbooks, but widely accessible, especially some edgy ones meant for the back pocket, and active types.
A Rulebook for Arguments
By far my best known and widely used book is A Rulebook for Arguments, first published by Hackett Publishing Company in 1986 and now about to appear in its 6th edition (2027).
A concise, popular guide to constructing and evaluating arguments, structured around specific, easy-to-follow rules. It teaches readers how to build sound arguments using examples, analogies, and authority, while also identifying common fallacies like ad hominem and ad populum.
“This book is a brief introduction to the art of making arguments. It sticks to the bare essentials. I have found that students and writers often need just such a list of reminders and rules, not lengthy introductory explanations. This book is therefore organized around specific rules, illustrated and explained soundly but above all briefly.”
New sections in the 6th edition also address current state of public discourse. Later chapters may be a useful complement to Chapters 3 and 4 of Philosophy's Big Chance.
A Workbook for Arguments
with Professor David Morrow
(Hackett Publishing Company, 3rd edition 2019, 4th edition 2027)
This is a full-scale textbook for critical thinking classes, fully incorporating A Rulebook for Arguments with extensive elaborations and wide-ranging exercises, as well as detailed model responses with commentary, and suggestions for further practice.
Later chapters make a useful complement to Chapters 3 and 4 of Philosophy's Big Chance.
Thinking Through Questions: A Concise Invitation to Critical, Expansive, and Philosophical Inquiry
with Professor Stephen Bloch-Schulman
(Hackett Publishing Company, 2020)
“This book is a brief practical guide to the use of questions. It aims to help you sharpen your critical questioning, improve your creative questi0ning, and better understand philosophical questioning. It should also leave you more alert to certain common misuses of questioning, so that you are able to turn questionable questions to better effect… It takes specific and focused skills to be able to critically question some assertion or argument rather than just accepting or rejecting it. It takes other skills to seek a more expansive range of options when some problem, big or small, seems thoroughly stuck. It takes other skills yet again to come to grips with real philosophical questions... This book offers you some first steps in all of these directions, along with extensive and engaging exercises.”
Creativity for Critical Thinkers
(Oxford University Press, 2006)
This book is a concise introduction to creativity--the art of expanding possibility. Covering such practical methods as multiplying options, brainstorming, lateral thinking, reframing problems, and many others, it offers provocative and effective methods for constructive and expansive kinds of thinking. These methods are illustrated and reinforced through exercises and applications that range from science and technology to the arts; from the small aggravations of everyday life to the largest difficulties in politics, the family, and the future; and from "creative good citizenship" to "creativity to change the world.
(PS. the so-called Canadian version is not by me (or not enough by me for me to endorse it, even though my name is on it…I was not asked))
Creative Problem-Solving in Ethics
(Oxford University Press, 2006)
Sister to Creativity for Critical Thinkers, this short handbook offers a uniquely constructive set of tools for engaging complex and controversial ethical problems. Covering such practical methods as diversifying options, lateral thinking, reframing problems, approaching conflicts as creative opportunities, and many others, it shows how to find "room to move" inside even the most challenging ethical problems, and thereby discover new and productive ways to deal with them. The book features exercises and applications that consider a wide range of familiar ethical issues, including the moral status of animals, the death penalty, poverty, drug use, and many others, and ends with some of the toughest: abortion, assisted suicide, and environmental ethics.
These two creative-thinking handbooks with Oxford were initially meant to have a third sister, explicitly about creative and re-imaginative thinking and social change-making. For various reasons that project did not fly with OUP, but it eventually found a welcome and truly appropriate home at New Society Publishers.
How to Re-Imagine the World: A Pocket Guide for Practical Visionaries
(New Society Publishers, 2007)
The publisher’s blurb:
“This book is a brief conceptual toolbox for imagining and initiating radical social change. A guide to BIG ideas — to reawakening the radical imagination for social transformation. Who says that all possible social and political systems have already been invented? Or that work — or marriage, or environmentalism, or anything else — must be just what they are now?”
Some of the examples a bit dated now, but its twenty-three practical and challenging maxims are as applicable as ever. Note that Chapter 2 of Jobs for Philosophers is also directly relevant.
Creative Futures Conspiracies: A matrix and some maxims for radical social reimagination
Invited essay for the Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures, Edited by Gabrielle Donnelly and Alfonso Montuori (Routledge, 2022)
Official abstract: “The work of radical social re-imagination – at once gritty and adventurous – needs incubation and organizational support. This essay proposes one possible matrix for incubating and supporting it: what I call Creative Futures Conspiracies (CFCs). The work also needs a high level of skill and persistence at creative and often system-level re-imagination. Within a CFC matrix, such re-imaginative work can be challenged forth and guided by key creative-thinking maxims, sketched out in the paper's second half.”