Preface

This is a textbook written primarily for my students in PHIL 1502: Critical Thinking, at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

There are many good textbooks for critical thinking on the market today, so why write another one? First, all of those books were written for someone else’s course. None cover all of the topics that I would like to cover in class. Second, as I’m sure any student can attest to, textbooks are remarkably expensive, to the point that most of the world’s population cannot afford access to good learning material. I’m beginning to think of access to information as a moral issue. Now, if I could become wealthy by publishing a book on critical thinking, I might be willing to put the ethical considerations aside.1 Since all profit would likely go to the publisher, however, I might as well just give the book away.

The book is written in R Markdown with the R bookdown package, and published on R Studio Connect. There is a link at the top of the page to download a PDF version of the text. If you do that, keep in mind that there will be formatting errors.

Warning: if you are looking for the perfect book on critical thinking, this will not be it. For various reasons, this text is likely to always be a work in progress. I can promise, though, that it will be worth as least as much as you paid for it.

  1. As a wise man once said, every person has to decide for themselves what level of hypocrisy they’re willing to live with.↩︎