Tony Blair
The founder of CRRAR in 2006, “Tony” Blair served as its initiating co-director with his frequent co-author Ralph Johnson.
Educated at McGill and Michigan, Blair has spent his academic career at the University of Windsor.
He was employed in the philosophy department from 1967 to 2006, serving two terms as its Head, and retiring as professor of philosophy emeritus and as a Distinguished University Professor. With Johnson, he organized the first-ever informal logic conference in 1978, and founded the refereed journal, Informal Logic, in 1984 (where he is still an active editor). He was a founding executive member of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT) and served on the four-member board of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), based at the University of Amsterdam, from its inception in 1985 until 2006.
The co-author of Logical-Self Defense (with Johnson: 4 editions) and Reasoning, A Practical Guide (with Robert Pinto; and also Katharine Parr for the Canadian edition), he has authored or co-authored numerous influential papers (a selection collected in Groundwork in the Theory of Argumentation, 2012), and co-edited several anthologies and proceedings.
His honours include the 2012 ISSA Distinguished Scholarship Award, the festschrift Reason Reclaimed (Hansen & Pinto, 2007) and the named “J. Anthony Blair Prize”, awarded for the outstanding student paper at the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation conferences.
He continues to lead a busy pro bono scholarly life attending conferences, publishing papers, co-editing Informal Logic, refereeing manuscripts and editing books.