Board members (executive) 2022-2023
- Lilian Bermejo-Luque, Immediate Past-President
- Kevin Possin, President
- Dona Warren, Vice President
- Donald Hatcher, Treasurer
Directors at large - John Casey
- Frank Fair
- Maurice Finocchiaro
- Jean Goodwin
- Dima Mohammed
- Yun (Robert) Xie
- Mark Weinstein
Organizers of sessions at APA divisional meetings
- Jeff Buechner (Eastern)
- Thomas Brummage (Central)
- Carolyn Cusick (Pacific)
Newsletter Editor
- Pat Bondy
- Geoff Goddu (2015-2017)
Member Area Website Administrator
- Derek Allen
Essay Publicist
- Gilbert Plumer
- Ben Hamby (2016-2018)
Essay Prize Administrator
- Derek Allen
Appointments Committee
- Dan Boone
- Maurice Finocchiaro (chair)
- Dima Mohammed
Critical Thinking Assessment Committee
- Bob Ennis
- Michael Scriven
- Kevin Possin
Nominating Committee
Under AILACT’s constitution, this is a standing committee (Article VII.1). It solicits and makes nominations for election to the Board of Directors. Our recent practice has been to appoint members to the Committee in and for the year of a Board election.
Recruitment Committee
Textbook Review Committee
- Dona Warren
- Jan Sobocan
- Ian Dove
Proposal Writing Committee
- Frank Fair
- Trudy Govier
- Don Hatcher
Director Profiles
President
Kevin Possin is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Winona State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in philosophy of mind and epistemology. While teaching at Winona State, he focused on applied ethics and critical thinking, authoring a computer-assisted critical-thinking text, with practice and exam software with access to over 5000 exercises. After publishing “A Field Guide to Critical-Thinking Assessment,” he has published more extensive critiques of commercially available assessment tests such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment Test, the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment Test, the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Test, and the CAT: The Critical-Thinking Assessment Test. His most recent targets for critique have been conductive arguments [“Conductive Arguments: Why Is This Still a Thing?”] and the trending skepticism about whether teaching critical thinking can be effective.
email kpossin@winona.edu
Vice-President
Dona Warren is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, has been teaching critical thinking since 1995 and delivering professional development workshops on teaching critical thinking since 2007. She received the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s excellence in teaching award in 1998 and 2015, and the state-wide University of Wisconsin Regents’ teaching excellence award in 2010. She is currently Head of the Critical Thinking Center at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, where I teach critical thinking and provide workshops to faculty and instructional staff interested in incorporating intentional critical thinking instruction into their courses. Her area of special interest is argument mapping and the graphical representation of reasoning generally.
email dwarren@uwsp.edu
Treasurer
Donald Hatcher is a Senior Professor of Philosophy at Baker University. From 1990 to 2008, he directed BU’s Critical Thinking and Liberal Arts Program, a three-semester requirement of all BU students. Hatcher’s books include Science, Ethics, and Technological Assessment, 6th. ed. (2020), Logic for Critical Thinkers (2020) and Reasoning and Writing: From Critical Thinking to Composition, 3rd. ed. (2006). He has published numerous papers on critical thinking and critical-thinking assessment and has served as AILACT Treasurer since 1988.
email Donal Hatcher
Board members
Lilian Bermejo-Luque [ex officio, as Immediate Past President] is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy I at the University of Granada. She is the Director of the Scientific Unit of Excellence on controversies and public debates FiloLab. Her areas of specialization are Argumentation Theory and Theories of Rationality. She is the author of Giving Reasons. A linguistic pragmatic approach to Argumentation Theory (Springer, Argumentation Series, 2011). She has been a member of AILACT since 2005. She founded Revista Iberoamericana de Argumentación, a scholarly journal on Argumentation Studies for the Ibero-american academic community, and she co-founded and is a member of the steering committee of the European Conference on Argumentation series, and she serves as referee for the main journals and scientific committees within the field.
email Lilian Bermejo-Luque
John Casey earned a PhD in philosophy at Loyola University Chicago (2002), with a dissertation on medieval theories of intentional relations. He has taught in various places, including Cedar Rapids and Rome, Italy. He is now associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) in Chicago, where teaches courses on logic, critical thinking, and history of philosophy. He maintains a research interest in medieval philosophy, though he now works mainly in argumentation studies. In this field, his main interests are fallacy theory, the problem of meta-argument, and fallacy theory. With frequent collaborator Scott Aikin (Vanderbilt) he has recently published Straw Man Arguments: A Study in Fallacy Theory (Bloomsbury).
email John Casey
Frank Fair started the Critical Thinking course at his university many years ago, shortly after Kahane’s Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric appeared. Over the years the course evolved, and it is now an option in his university core curriculum under the Social and Behavioral Sciences heading. In recent years he has pursued a number of projects that relate to critical thinking as he conceives it. These projects include an empirical study of the durable impact of a Philosophy for Children program of weekly structured discussions of philosophical and ethical topics. This was a successful replication of a study done in Scotland, and the results are reported in two articles in the Journal of Philosophy in Schools: 1) “Socrates in the schools from Scotland to Texas: Replicating a study on the effects of a Philosophy for Children Program,” and 2) “Socrates in the schools: Gains at three-year follow-up.” He has collaborated with a number of colleagues to produce a number of books in a variety of areas ranging from a business fable to a treatment of epistemological issues aimed at the various constituencies in education. But the book most relevant to AILACT was one co-edited with Dan Fasko: Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment (2020, Brill/Sense). In addition, he was Managing Editor of Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines from 2010 to 2017, when he retired from full-time teaching.
email Frank Fair
Maurice Finocchiaro is a graduate of MIT (B.S.) and UC Berkeley (Ph.D.); now Distinguished Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus), University of Nevada-Las Vegas; author of Galileo and the Art of Reasoning (1980), Arguments about Arguments (2005), Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (2010), Meta-argumentation (2013), On Trial for Reason (2019), and Science, Method, and Argument in Galileo (2021), among other books; former AILACT Vice-president (1986-88, 2003-05) and President (2005-07); and recipient of the 2008 ISSA Distinguished Scholarship Award.
email Maurice Finocchiaro
Jean Goodwin is SAS Institute Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric & Technical Communication at NC State University. Grounded in her training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s rhetoric program, her work has long focused on developing a normative pragmatic approach to civic argumentation. Most recently, she has examined scientists’ participation in policy controversies and explored the potentials of automated discourse analysis for helping us understand macro-scale properties of argumentation. Her articles have appeared in Argumentation, Informal Logic, Argumentation & Advocacy and other international journals and edited collections; a complete account can be found at her website, jeangoodwin.net. Her teaching across a variety of Communication courses has often aimed to integrate the skills of argument and debate into theory or “content’ courses, and to integrate theory into skills courses. As a member of NC State’s Leadership in Public Science faculty cluster, she has also developed public communication training for scientists based in the liberal arts.
email Jean Goodwin
Dima Mohammed is a postdoctoral researcher at the Reasoning and Argumentation Lab, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Dima holds a PhD degree in Argumentation Theory (University of Amsterdam, 2009). Her research focuses on the complexities of public political arguments and the challenges these pose. She is interested in questions related to the strategic shape and the rationality of argumentative exchanges, as well as in the links between argumentative and political dimensions of the argumentative practice. She has taught argumentation and persuasion courses in different universities in the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland and Canada. She served as member of programme and organizing committees of various argumentation conferences including the 1st European Conference on Argumentation (ECA Lisbon 2015) and OSSA 2016. She is an acting member of several academic associations and initiatives, including the AILACT Appointment Committee and the Steering Committee of the European Conference on Argumentation.
email Dima Mohammed
Mark Weinstein holds the PhD from the City University of New York with a specialization in Philosophy of Science. He is a Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University where he served as Associate Director in the Institute of Critical Thinking. He has published widely in critical thinking, informal logic and argumentation theory including a number of edited volumes relating critical thinking to the humanities, social and natural sciences and teacher education. His current work focuses on argumentation in chemistry. Recent publications include Logic, Truth and Inquiry published in a series: Studies in Logic and Argumentation by College Publications, London University (2013), “The periodic table and the model of emerging truth,” in Foundations of Chemistry (2016) and “The philosophical importance of the periodic table,” forthcoming in a volume on the periodic table published by Oxford University Press.
email Mark Weinstein
Yun Xie is a professor of logic and philosophy at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. His primary research interests lie in informal logic and the social-cultural studies on argumentation. He has published articles in journals like Argumentation, Informal Logic, and Argumentation and Advocacy. Now he serves as an Editorial Board Member for the Journal Informal Logic and the Journal of Argumentation in Context.
email Yun Xie
Previous board members
- Derek Allen
- Mark Battersby
- Sharon Bailin
- Tony Blair
- Dan Cohen
- Robert H. Ennis
- Jim Freeman, immediate past president
- Trudy Govier
- Leo Groarke
- Hans Hansen
- John Hoaglund
- David Hitchcock
- Ralph H. Johnson
- Gabrijela Kišiček
- Connie Missimer
- Gerald M. Nosich
- Susana Nuccetelli
- Steven Patterson
- Laura Elizabeth Pinto
- Kevin Possin
- Michael Scriven
- Harvey Siegel
- Tom Solon
- Dale Turner
- Frank Zenker
Past presidents
- 2018-2021 Lilian Bermejo Luque, University of Granada, Spain
- 2013-2018 Jim Freeman, City University of New York
- 2007-2013 Derek Allen, University of Toronto
- 2005-2007 Maurice A. Finocchiaro, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
- 2001-2005 Robert H. Ennis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 1995-2001 co-presidents: Sharon Bailin, Simon Fraser University; Connie Missimer, Independent Scholar
- 1991-1995 Jonathan E. Adler, Brooklyn College & Graduate School, CUNY
- 1989-1991 Lenore Langsdorf, Southern Illinois University
- 1987-1989 Mark Weinstein, Montclair State University
- 1985-1987 John Hoaglund, Christopher Newport University
- 1983-1985 David Hitchcock, McMaster University
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