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Stephen Edelston Toulmin (born March 25, 1922) is a British philosopher and author. He was influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein at the University of Cambridge and wrote his doctoral dissertiation with an "Wittgensteinian" analysis on how humans reason about ethical and moral issues. After his graduation, he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Oxford.

He is Professor at University of Southern California and has lived in the United States since 1959. He is known for seminal work in modeling arguments. He works towards a "return to reason", as opposed to what he sees as the more scientistic modern "rationality". He looks down on the materialist and dualist world view of Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, while Montaigne is one of his favourites.

In the 1950's his opera (The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction (1953), The Uses of Argument (1958)) were in part starting a revolution on the the philosophy of science, the culmination of which was probably Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

Works

• An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950)
• An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (1953)
• The Uses of Argument (1958)
• Metaphysical Beliefs, Three Essays (1957) with Ronald W. Hepburn and Alasdair MacIntyre
• The Riviera (1961)
• Foresight and Understanding: an Enquiry into the Aims of Science (1961)
• The Architecture of Matter (1962) with June Goodfield
• The Fabric of the Heavens: the Development of Astronomy and Dynamics (1963) with June Goodfield
• Night Sky at Rhodes (1963)
• The Discovery of Time (1966) with June Goodfield
• Physical Reality (1970)
• Human Understanding (1972)
• Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1972) with Allan Janik
• Knowing and Acting: An Invitation to Philosophy (1976)
• An Introduction to Reasoning (1979) with Allan Janik and Richard D. Rieke
• The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (1985)
• The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988) with Albert R. Jonsen
• Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990)
• Social Impact of AIDS in the United States (1993) with Albert R. Jonsen
• Return to Reason (2001)

External links

• Stephen Toulmin - An Intellectual Odyssey

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