Customer Reviews

Becoming a Critical Thinker: A Guide for the New Millennium, Second Edition

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First, let me say that the "Legally English is Axiomatic" reviewer is incoherent. He also, sort of, wrote in English; and his comments are meaningless. The three people who considered his review valuable must be slightly insane.

This is a valuable book. However, it does contain some flaws. It uses recent political examples where frequently the settled facts are not clear. It seems ironic that a book teaching critical thinking should require its readers to already be critical thinkers when it comes to sortin out the authors political opinion. Furthermore, as a classroom text, these examples could spark debate that could distract the class from understanding the concept being taught. The book also has not been properly proof-read. There are occassional minor lapses in grammar and spelling: This can become mildly annoying. The books preface praising "Socrates" as he is found in Plato is also distressing. I am not certain that Socrates is the model critical thinker given that many of the claims of Platonism are explicitly anti-empirical. Last, the book should treat the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics to logic more deeply. For this see David Kelly's and H.W.B Joeseph's books.

The book does have many virtues though. Topics of rhetoric like evaluating sources and being aware of weasal words are covered in this book: These topics are rarely taught and certainly should be taught along with the other parts of logic. This is a major virtue. The excercises are well constructed and force the reader to apply his new found understanding to the world; his knowledge is not allowed to remain unconnected to his everyday thinking.

This is a very good book with some minor flaws.

The print is poor. More seriously the cover is upside down.

No quality checks before dispatch?

This book is going straight back.

I will amend the review when/if a replacement comes.

This work is typical of the problems in American higher education--the workbook is overpriced (a comparable workbook in other, non-academic settings would be about $12), and the left-sided bias of the author/professor shows through in every page through political and social commentary. The content is surface-level of the type that can be found with an internet search of "critical thinking" or "principles of logic" or similar.