Books like Arguing and Thinking

This book was one of the first to take critical thinking beyond a purely academic focus on informal logic, so that it deals with ‘real-world’ material (even including cartoon strips).

As the author explains, he was concerned that, though his students could learn from informal logic books how to identify and label errors in reasoning, they were unable to transfer this understanding to their own writing and to everyday material.

There are many useful exercises after each chapter, enabling the reader to apply their understanding of the content. The author hopes that the book is both rigorous and accessible, and this hope is indeed vindicated.

This book appealed to me when I first read it many years ago because of the way in which it explains the skills of critical thinking in a very approachable and interesting way.

It does this by using simple and everyday examples such that the reader develops the skills through applying the theoretical aspects of critical thinking to them. In addition, there are plenty of ‘self-tests’ for the reader to check and reinforce their learning.

It is clear that the author’s experience with teaching students gives him a good understanding of how critical thinking should be approached.

This book takes a different approach to the more general accounts of critical thinking, by focusing on how it helps us to appreciate literature.

The author does this by showing how using critical thinking can deepen our understanding of literature, including drama (Shakespeare, Beckett), poetry (such as Donne, Larkin, Marvell, Owen, and Wordsworth), and first-person narratives.

The book sparkles with wonderful applications of critical thinking, enabling us to appreciate texts such that we see them in a new way, with all sorts of insights being suggested and developed. Her plea that we should also look at screenplays by using a critical thinking perspective is very convincing.

Read this book and your reading of literature will be significantly enriched. 

Though people might argue that this isn’t technically a book on critical thinking, they need to look at the detail of the contents to see that it very much fits.

Though the celebrated philosopher Schopenhauer stressed that we should dedicate our lives "to truth", he recognised that out in the world there are "places of narrow-mindedness and incapacity that are so closely allied to obstinacy, vanity and dishonesty".

The strategies given in the book fit very well with many of the flaws identified in critical thinking such as over-generalising, begging the question, appealing to authority, and using false syllogisms. In this way, the critical thinker can spot the strategies and so turn the tables on the argumentative opponent, thus making them not (always) right.

Although many critical thinking texts include some analysis of bits from popular culture, I wanted to include this book on my list because, as its title indicates, it focuses on popular culture­—which is good because most of us immerse ourselves in popular culture and so it influences our thinking in a huge way. There's a whole chapter. There's a whole chapter dedicated to "Analyzing American Television," another dedicated to "American Advertising and the Subtle Art of Manipulation," and one dedicated to "Popular Culture in Speeches."  

Jamil Zaki’s investigations into the psychology of empathy suggest it may be an important resource to combat rising levels of political polarization. Zaki makes a strong case that empathy is a malleable characteristic—that it can be grown or expanded.

He suggests that we can train our minds to empathize beyond our narrow ingroups. Collectively, these findings, and others, lead me to believe that a more empathic community may be a more open one.

One of the few true geniuses in sociology, he lifted the field up into new and innovation dimensions. If there were a Nobel Prize in sociology, he would most likely get it, followed by the three people above (Merton, Mills, and Gouldner). I knew him well. He could walk into a room and an hour later tell you all the power plays, conflicts, and inside dope.

Some of his terms have entered our language: front-stage, back stage (meaning what goes on in front of an audience, meaning your social interactions) are different from what goes on backstage, behind the scenes, kind of like a play. His book, Stigma, is used in many fascinating ways; not just someone blind or disfigured but also a Black person, a gay person, or a hippy; but mostly he shows in terrifying ways, how people hide or cope with their “stigma”—the subtitle tells it all… show more.

Identity isn’t personal, it is shaped by all sorts of influences, some of them we are very aware of and some of them we have never thought about. To be free means to be aware of all of them.

Appiah shows that while you cannot escape identity, you can pick and choose much more than most people make us believe. There is no inevitability and that is extremely liberating.

As a white woman, it made me see much better how not to equate privilege with guilt only, but responsibility and agency. 

A concise and lucid sociological treatise that relates forgetting to the transitions and rapid changes of contemporary urban life, which has eroded the ways in which societies traditionally remembered the past.

The book, written in mid-century, has some of the most powerful hypotheses of social psychology, which, along with the ideas of fellow émigré from Germany, Kurt Lewin, gave birth to the field of social psychology. Read Chapter 4 at least. I do every 5 years or so. The chapter gave rise to both dissonance theory and attribution theory, two of the major accomplishments of social psychology.