Stephen Toulmin

Stephen Edelston Toulmin was born on 25 March 1922 in London. Influenced by Wittgenstein, he developed the Toulmin Argument, making him the founding father of argumentation theory. Junior Scientific Officer for the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1942, he became Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at Oxford in 1949. After his professorship at Leeds in 1955, he became Director at the Nuffield Foundation’s Unit for the History of Scientific Ideas in 1960. Toulmin emigrated to the US in 1965, holding positions at Columbia, Stanford, and Brandeis. He retired as Henry R. Luce Professor of Mult-Ethnic and Transnational Studies at USC. 

Appointed Jefferson Lecturer in 1997, he was also awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art and an honorary degree from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. While postmodernists claimed him as one of their own, he preferred to be called a ‘neo-postmodernist’. Influential works include The Philosophy of Science (1953), The Uses of Argument (1958), Foresight and Understanding (1960), The Discovery of Time (1965), Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990), and Return to Reason (2001).