The Art of Thinking: A Guide to Critical and Creative Thought [Paperback]

Vincent Ryan Ruggiero (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321012631 | ISBN-13: 978-0321012630 | Publication Date: July 1997 | Edition: 5th

The Art of Thinking is a comprehensive guide to critical and creative thinking that emphasizes what to do rather than what to avoid doing. This text introduces students to the principles and techniques of creative thinking; teaches them how to evaluate their own ideas, as well as the ideas of others; and shows them how to persuade. Organized into four parts - "Be Aware, " "Be Creative, " "Be Critical, " and "Communicate Your Ideas" - The Art of Thinking presents students with a step-by-step process for problem solving that involves searching for issues, expressing the problem, investigating the issue, production ideas, and evaluating and refining the solution. Special features in the fifth edition include new sections on the importance on thinking, testing ideas, and conducting one's own research; and expanded discussions of the problem of remembering and of the distinction between language and reality. These new features, in addition to those retained from previous editions, continue to make The Art of Thinking a valuable and effective tool for promoting excellent critical thinking and writing.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Accessible and engaging, this unique book offers strategies for critical and creative thinking and includes many opportunities for practicing these skills. This book is a comprehensive guide to critical and creative thinking that also shows readers how to persuade others. By introducing readers to the principals and techniques of creative thinking and how to evaluate their own ideas and the ideas of others, The Art of Thinking, 6/e presents readers with a step-by-step process for problem solving. For anyone interested in exploring critical and creative thinking. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 281 pages
• Publisher: Longman Pub Group; 5th edition (July 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321012631
• ISBN-13: 978-0321012630
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #830,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Insights on How "Thinking" Works, September 2, 2003

By 

paul_cheng "K.F." (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of Thinking: A Guide to Critical and Creative Thought (6th Edition) (Paperback)

This title was the first text book I used in my first ever philosophy class at college some 20 years ago. It really inspired me to start "thinking" about how people think. The flow of the topics and the content successfully aroused my mind and the book actually helped me a lot on ways of thinking even until now. I just want to let everyone know that this title is an excellent read for teenagers to adults alike.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Art of Thinking, August 3, 2001

By 

Prof. Adam Davis (Kirksville, MO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of Thinking: A Guide to Critical and Creative Thought (Paperback)

I am much taken with the approach to thinking as an activity with its own structure, a structure which once articulated can be effectively mapped onto its expressions in writing and speech. One of the things that concerns me very deeply about students, and it's perhaps just a cultural moment (but a long one, with no end in sight) is a presumption of determinism concerning their own ways of thinking. It's visible in the grammatical structures they use to describe current practices: "I'm not much of a reader;" "I need to be entertained to find a book worthwhile" -- they even extend it to the legibility of their handwriting. Ruggiero's assumption that one can modify the nature of one's thinking by a process of examination, insight and will, is bound to be liberating. In fact, it's a time honored principle of western intellectual and spiritual traditions, but not well suited to social constructivist models of cognition and composition in their cruder forms. The advice to "be creative" would be spectacularly useless without the quite accessible, though not at all reductive, inquiry into certain definable features of thought-processes which result in things we generally regard as pretty good creative thinking. The approach of the book overall has both conservative and innovative aspects, and as a totality it gains my respect. It assumes a reasonable tone of authority, and validates the claim by proceeding intelligibly through a jargon-free but theoretically sound account of the various processes we designate by "thinking," and distinguishing purposeful thinking from other kinds of mental activity. With the exception of a few unfortunate tics that have a certain unpleasant, 19th century tang to them ("bad habits" is not a phrase consistent with the overall tone of Ruggiero's book), the text communicates high expectations, and makes the attainment of them attractive to students.

On the whole, the exercises provide a pedagogically useful range for leading students through issues in which their own interests are directly and obviously involved, through analogy and homology to issues of wider cultural import, where the need for their own policy input may seem less urgent, and their own interests less directly involved. A sort of school for citizenship, if it works, and that is certainly among the explicit objectives of my own writing pedagogy. It's a good book for students who need to become comfortable with the idea of themselves as intellectuals, and who are overcoming the sociology of high school, which tends to assign intellectual ambitions to authority and its lackeys, and to have a fairly muddy- headed notion that purposeless consumption is a kind of political expression. I think the book will work best with bright students who have been underchallenged in the past.

The ethos of the book is competent, analytical (but not cold or sterile), not given to a lot of self-discourse. There are hints here and there that the author feels that the language of affect has come to overshadow patterns of reasoning in recent rhetorical history. The order of presentation is not inevitable -- nor does it claim to be -- but rational, and adaptable to a number of pedagogical purposes. It's not meant to be all things for all courses, and some instructors may find that they need compositional matters more explicitly and consistently frontloaded -- but then, they'll want a full-scale reader with a handbook of grammar and usage as well. Since this is the 6th edition, there must be a great many teaches who find this book useful, but I suppose I'm (pleasantly) surprised that a text this challenging finds a consistent niche.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful textbook; Popular with students, August 20, 2001

By 

John Pappas (Stockton, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of Thinking: A Guide to Critical and Creative Thought (Paperback)

I have been using Mr. Ruggiero's text, The Art of Thinking, in college writing classes for several years. It has been very useful in introducing ideas about thinking and organization to my students. I use the text and provide several exercises based on readings and real life situations. Many students have told me at the end of the semester that this book is a "keeper." In other words they were not going to sell the book back to the bookstore, but instead were going to keep it for further use in their lives. They particularly liked the section on the creative process as an organizational process, and the section on habits that hinder thinking. They said they found these sections helpful both in their college tasks and in their own personal lives. I plan to continue using this fine book.