Acknowledgements
Eric’s Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following reviewers, whose comments and suggestions on drafts of the original text were much appreciated: Keneth Boyd, Darcy Cutler, Bruce Howes, and Mikal A. Radford.
I would also like to thank Anthony Jenkins for his helpful advice on categorical logic and George Williamson and Derek Postnikoff, who taught sections of critical thinking using earlier versions of this text and had helpful comments. A debt of gratitude also goes to the large number of authors whose books I read or used during more than twenty years of teaching critical thinking. And lastly, I would like to thank the helpful people at Pearson Education Canada who helped bring the previous version of this book out—Christine Cozens, Joel Gladstone, Rema Celio, and Richard di Santo—as well as Dianne Fowlie, Susan Bindernagel, and Sally Glover for their commitment to the previous original text.
Kristin’s Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Vanessa Lehan and Maya Seshia for their detailed reviews of this text. I owe many thanks to Megan Hall, who has been instrumental in all stages of the Open Educational Resource development. My thanks to Dan Cockroft, Kathy Killoh, and everyone behind the scenes at AU Press. Thank you to Jessica Tang for your artwork based on our drawings. I benefited greatly from the support of my faculty, principally my dean, Manijeh Mananni, for supporting this project, as well as numerous colleagues who shouldered workloads to help this along: Mark McCutcheon, Nisha Nath, Katie MacDonald, Davina Bhandar, Lynn Hughey Engelbert, Suzanne McCullagh, Chris McTavish, and Wendell Kisner. Thank you to my students who piloted the earlier version of this text and to Robert Andrews for many discussions about how to make my text more accessible to Indigenous learners. I continue to be lucky to receive pedagogical and scholarly advice from Cressida J. Heyes, to whom I am grateful in perpetuity.
Principally, I thank Eric Dayton, whose generosity, incisiveness, and commitment to accessible philosophical education are evident on every page of his text. Because of community-engaged, dedicated, and ethically responsive pedagogues such as Eric, Open Educational Resources are now becoming more common. Throughout his immense teaching career, he developed these materials by revising and reteaching, progressively adapting and responding to his students’ needs. He designed his own diagrams in WordPerfect and distributed the text as a low-cost coursepack. Eric taught supersections of this course for over two decades in Saskatoon and it will come as no suprise to those who know him that he often gets stopped in grocery stores and on the street by former students who are adamant that this course was their favourite—and most useful—course of their undergraduate studies. As an undergraduate student, I did not think I could pursue graduate training in philosophy until Eric asked me to grade critical thinking exams in 2004. He was the first and most convincing philosopher to encourage me to pursue graduate training (both times). I work to live up to the great gift of his mentorship.