Thinking Critically

Become a sophisticated creative and critical thinker with Chaffee/Carr/Proctor's "Thinking Critically" 13th Edition, which guides you to develop core abilities needed for academic and career success. First, you'll build confidence by learning and practicing key reasoning and problem-solving skills and connecting them to your personal experiences. Then, you'll progress to the types of reasoning skills required for abstract contexts -- such as those you'll encounter across your academic career. Activities and writing assignments invite your active participation and prompt you and your peers to critically examine each other's thinking. Thought-provoking and contemporary readings from a variety of thinkers engage you to think about complex issues from different perspectives. Along the way, you'll track your progress as a critical thinker with self-assessment activities.

John Chaffee, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of philosophy at The City University of New York, where he has developed a Philosophy and Critical Thinking program that annually involves 25 faculty and 3,000 students. He is a nationally recognized figure in the area of critical thinking, having authored leading textbooks and many professional articles. He has also conducted numerous conference presentations and workshops throughout the country. In developing programs to teach people to think more effectively in all academic subjects and areas of life, Dr. Chaffee has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He was selected as New York Educator of the Year and received the Distinguished Faculty Award for Diversity in Teaching in Higher Education.

Cheri Carr, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at CUNY's LaGuardia Community College, where she is the director of LaGuardia's Philosophy for Children Internship, a program designed to educate college students in philosophical and creative thinking through engaging young children in the life of the mind. She is known for her research integrating feminist ethics with Deleuzo-Guattarian frameworks of thought, and has presented her work at conferences and workshops worldwide. She is the author of "Deleuze's Kantian Ethos: Critique as a Way of Life" (2014) and the co-author of "Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism" (2019).

Shannon Proctor, Ph.D., is an associate professor of philosophy in the Humanities Department as well as the Liberal Arts Coordinator at LaGuardia Community College. Her research explores the interconnections among habituality, substance use and freedom with a particular focus on the ways in which substance misuse disorders temporal experience. She is the author of "The Temporal Structure of Habits and the Possibility of Transformation" (2016). Her pedagogical work focuses on the importance of argumentation and interdisciplinary research skills for improving student outcomes. Between 2019-20 she was a co-PI on an National Endowment for the Humanities grant on Mass Incarceration and the Humanities, which culminated in a community-wide showcase that highlighted students' research and creative projects.