RICHARD W. PAUL: BIOGRAPHY AND MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS - PHILOSOPHY - 2025

Richard W. Paul was a philosopher who promoted the development of a model that allows the systematic development of critical thinking skills. He was the creator of The Critical Thinking Community Foundation.

Paul worked since the early 1980s to promote the concept of critical thinking.

Throughout his professional career he wrote eight books and more than 200 articles on critical thinking.

One of his most important works was published in 1992 and was called Critical Thinking: What Each Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing World.

Richard Paul passed away on August 30, 2015, after suffering from Parkinson's disease for several years.

Biographical data

Richard Paul was a visionary and a pioneer. He understood the educational environment as a suitable space for exchange between teachers and students.

For him, this space should result in an open and free dialogue between opposing points of view, to develop a true exercise of critical thinking.

He was born in Chicago on January 2, 1937. He earned a BA from Northern Illinois University and an MA in English from Santa Barbara University.

He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Santa Barbara in 1968. He was a professor at Sonoma State University for almost thirty years and convened in 1981 the First Global Conference for Critical Thinking.

Over the years this conference has gained worldwide recognition from academic authorities.

He participated in each of these conferences until 2014, the year in which the disease prevented his presentation.

The work of the philosopher reveals the influence of great thinkers such as Socrates, Freud, Wittgenstein, John Henry Newman, Jean Piaget, William Graham Sumner and Karl Marx.

Paul observed that human beings are trapped in scenarios structured by economic realities over which they have no influence, and in which survival can be difficult.

According to Paul, to survive the human being needs to develop its own critical capacities.

Most valuable contributions

Paul established the conditions for an adequate theory of critical thinking, combining and synthesizing a number of obvious truths about this way of thinking.

1- Thinking equals human nature

Human nature is to think; that is to say, thought permeates every aspect of human life and every dimension of the human mind.

Human beings do not always think well, as human nature is influenced by frustrations, prejudices, ignorance, myths, and illusions.

For this reason, for the philosopher it is always necessary to work to improve critical thinking. The human being must be able to analyze and evaluate his own thinking and improve it almost if necessary.

Critical thinking always takes into account the rights of others. If human thinking is not in tune with justice and with the consideration of other points of view, it is not really critical thinking.

2- Conceptualization of critical thinking

He conceptualized reasoning as a set of eight distinctive elements of thinking: purposes, questions, information, inferences, assumptions, points of view, implications, and concepts.

When people reason, they do so with a purpose: to answer a question. The answers give you information that allows you to make inferences and make conclusions and assumptions.

For Paul, the intellectual virtues are the centerpiece of the critical person and of a reasonable conception of critical thinking.

According to this philosopher, those who develop intellectual character do so through a deep commitment to the ideals and principles of critical thinking, passionately pursued throughout life.

References

1. The Critical Thinking Community, “Remembering Richard Paul“ “, 2015. Retrieved on December 11, 2017 from criticalthinking.org
2. Greg Hart. "The passing of a critical thinking giant: Richar Paul", 2016. Retrieved on December 11, 2017 from skeptic.com