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Stephen Edelston Toulmin, Professor
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Department of Anthropology ResearchStephen Toulmin works on multiethnic and transnational studies, focusing on a politics based on the interaction of local and global institutions -- nongovernmental and supranational -- along with the loss of influence for Nation State governments. ----------------------- BioBorn in London, England, in 1922, Stephen Toulmin read physics at Cambridge and worked on radar in World War II. Returning to Cambridge, he read Philosophy during Ludwig Wittgenstein's last two years and published Reason in Ethics in 1949. Moving to Oxford, as University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science, he worked mainly in that field until the 1960s. Wittgenstein's skepticism led him to challenge the current reliance on "inductive logic" in philosophy of science: his book, The Uses of Argument (1958) generalized this challenge, emphasizing the "field dependence" of reasoning and seeing argumentation in all fields (Science, Law, Politics, Medicine and Ethics) as a practical activity. From then on, he explored the practices of reasoning, linking the theory of knowledge to the historical development of concepts and practices. During these years, he also wrote books on the History of Science: e.g. The Discovery of Time. Since 1965, he has worked in the United States: chiefly in the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought, from 1973 to 1986. There, he chiefly concentrated on Practical Reason, in Medicine and elsewhere, and on the historical evolution of the Humanities, exemplified in the 16th century tradition from Erasmus and Thomas More to Montaigne and Shakespeare. The contrast between the concrete particularity of 16th century Humanism and the abstract generality of the 17th century Exact Sciences was the heart of his reanalysis of "modernity" in Cosmopolis (1989). There, he mapped the rise of Exact Science in response to the broader crises of the 17th century -- e.g. the brutality of the Thirty Years War -- showing how the Westphalian settlement of 1648 imposed static ideals of Order on ideas about both Nature and of Society. ----------------------- Education1940-42 B.A., Mathematics and Physics, Cambridge University, England ----------------------- Recent Publications1989 Cosmopolis - The Free Press / 1991 Univ. of Chicago Press p/b ----------------------- Courses Taught----------------------- Awards and Honors1997 Thomas Jefferson Lecture, Natl. Endowment for the Humanities ----------------------- Professional Memberships----------------------- |