CDS Professional Reading List: Critical Thinking

In this history of philosophy during the course of the 20th century, the author reviews the discipline's divergent and dramatic course, showing that its greatest figures were deeply affected by the events of their time. From Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose famous Tractatus was actually composed in the trenches during World War I, to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the one a converted Jew who found himself barred from public life with Hitler's coming to power, the other a member of the Nazi party who later refused to repudiate German war crimes; from Bertrand Russell, whose lifelong pacifism led him to turn from logic and mathematics to social and moral questions, and Jean Paul Sartre, who made philosophy an occasion for direct and personal political engagement, to Rudolf Carnap, a committed socialist, and Karl Popper, a resolute opponent of Communism; from the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School to the contemporary work or philosophers, as variously minded as Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas adn Hilary Putnam - the thinking of these philosophers and scores of others should be understood within the context of the times in which they lived.

We are frequently confronted with arguments. Arguments are attempts to persuade us - to influence our beliefs and actions - by giving us reasons to believe this or that. Critical Thinking: A Concise Guidewill equip students with the concepts and techniques used in the identification, analysis and assessment of arguments. Through precise and accessible discussion, this book provides the tools to become a successful critical thinker, one who can act and believe in accordance with good reasons, and who can articulate and make explicit those reasons. Key topics discussed include: core concepts in argumentation how language can serve to obscure or conceal the real content of arguments; how to distinguish argumentation from rhetoric how to avoid common confusions surrounding words such as 'truth', 'knowledge' and 'opinion' how to identify and evaluate the most common types of argument how to distinguish good reasoning from bad in terms of deductive validly and induction. This fourth edition has been revised and updated throughout, with a new introduction for each chapter and up-to-date topical examples. Particular revisions include: practical reasoning; understanding quantitative data, statistics, and the rhetoric used about them; scientific reasoning; the connection to formal logic and the logic of probability; conditionals; ambiguity; vagueness; slippery slope arguments; and arguments by analogy. The dynamic Routledge Critical Thinkingcompanion website provides thoroughly updated resources for both instructors and students including new examples and case studies, flashcards, sample questions, practice questions and answers, student activities and a testbank of questions for use in the classroom.

Systems Thinking, Systems Practice "Whether by design, accident or merely synchronicity, Checkland appears to have developed a habit of writing seminal publications near the start of each decade which establish the basis and framework for systems methodology research for that decade." Hamish Rennie, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 1992 Thirty years ago Peter Checkland set out to test whether the Systems Engineering (SE) approach, highly successful in technical problems, could be used by managers coping with the unfolding complexities of organizational life. The straightforward transfer of SE to the broader situations of management was not possible, but by insisting on a combination of systems thinking strongly linked to real–world practice Checkland and his collaborators developed an alternative approach – Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) – which enables managers of all kinds and at any level to deal with the subtleties and confusions of the situations they face. This work established the now accepted distinction between ′hard′ systems thinking, in which parts of the world are taken to be ′systems′ which can be ′engineered′, and ′soft′ systems thinking in which the focus is on making sure the process of inquiry into real–world complexity is itself a system for learning. Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (1981) and Soft Systems Methodology in Action (1990) together with an earlier paper Towards a Systems–based Methodology for Real–World Problem Solving (1972) have long been recognized as classics in the field. Now Peter Checkland has looked back over the three decades of SSM development, brought the account of it up to date, and reflected on the whole evolutionary process which has produced a mature SSM. SSM: A 30–Year Retrospective, here included with Systems Thinking, Systems Practice closes a chapter on what is undoubtedly the most significant single research programme on the use of systems ideas in problem solving. Now retired from full–time university work, Peter Checkland continues his research as a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow.

Completely Updated and Revised This revised edition of Peter Senge’s bestselling classic, The Fifth Discipline, is based on fifteen years of experience in putting the book’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories in the book demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas in The Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published in 1990, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices. In The Fifth Discipline, Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning “disabilities” that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations—ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create results they truly desire. The updated and revised Currency edition of this business classic contains over one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies like BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, Saudi Aramco, and organizations like Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank. It features a new Foreword about the success Peter Senge has achieved with learning organizations since the book’s inception, as well as new chapters on Impetus (getting started), Strategies, Leaders’ New Work, Systems Citizens, and Frontiers for the Future. Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will: • Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them • Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity • Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets • Teach you to see the forest and the trees • End the struggle between work and personal time