Ralph Johnson (philosopher)

"I love to listen to music, especially classical. Currently I am in a Chopin phase. I also am drawn to the music of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert and Dvorak. I belong to The Mankind Project.... — a worldwide organization dedicated to calling men to consciousness and lives of service. I serve as an Elder and Board member in our local community. I exercise (jog, walk or bike) almost everyday[sic]. I have been married to my wife Maggie for 38 years; have three children (Mary, Sean and Matthew) and two grandchildren — Brandin, 11, and Ivy Grace b. January 27, 2006!"

Currently, Johnson is working on a book about sialectical adequacy, which will be a follow up to his work Manifest Rationality (2000).

According to the University of Windsor's website, "His articles have appeared in such journals as American Philosophical Quarterly, Synthese, Argumentation, Philosophy and Rhetoric and Informal Logic. In 1996, a collection of his articles and papers was published by Vale Press under the title The Rise of Informal Logic. In 2000, his book, Manifest Rationality: A Pragmatic Study of Argument, was published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Johnson has conducted seminars and workshops on informal logic and critical thinking across North America and in Europe. In 1993, Johnson received a 3M Teaching Fellowship for outstanding university teachers, one of ten such awards conferred that year in Canada. In 1994, he was awarded the rank of University Professor by the University of Windsor. In 2000, he was awarded the Distinguished Research Award by the International Society for the Study of Argumentation. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2005, he received the Career Achievement Award from the University of Windsor. Johnson is listed in Who's Who in Canada."

He was a co-chair for the International Symposium on Informal Logic in Windsor in 1978, 1983 and 1989. Ralph H. Johnson has lectured and published widely on informal logic, fallacy theory, argumentation, and critical thinking. He is a founding member and has been a previous member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT); as well as of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking (NCECT), and of the Canadian Research Group on Argumentation (Carga). In 2004 he co-founded the Network for the Study of Reasoning, a cluster of Canadian experts researching the theory and its applications of reasoning and argument. He has given workshop presentations and has been a consultant on informal logic and critical thinking across the United States and Canada.

In his article "Charity Begins at Home" in Informal Logic, Johnson combines and creates unified form of the "principle of charity" which he found to exist in four other forms in the works Thomas's Practical Reasoning in Natural Language (1973), Baum's Logic (1975) and in Scriven's Reasoning (1976). In doing so, he created a more developed "principle of charity" to which Informal Logicians could refer.

He earned an honors Bachelor of Arts at Xavier University and received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 1972. He has been a University Professor and University Professor emeritus at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, where he had taught since 1966. He retired in Fall 2006 after 39 years, during which he served two terms as Head of Department. Ralph H. Johnson was a co-founder of the Newsletter of Informal Logic which has since become the Journal of Informal Logic in 1985, he also served as its co-editor along with J. Anthony Blair since its inception.

Ralph Henry Johnson (born 1940) is a Canadian American philosopher, born in Detroit, Michigan. Johnson has been credited as one of the founding members of the informal logic movement in North America, along with J. Anthony Blair who co-published one of the movement's most influential texts, Logical Self-Defense, with Johnson. Alongside its founder, Blair, Johnson co-directed the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor. As Johnson and Blair write in the preface to the newest edition of Logical Self-Defense on the influential nature of the text: