Hans V. Hansen has been awarded degrees in philosophy from Lakehead University (BA with Honours), the University of Manitoba (MA) and Wayne State University (MA, PhD). He has taught at Wayne State University, Brock University, the University of Amsterdam and McMaster University before taking a position at the University of Windsor in 2000. Hansen has been involved with the journal Informal Logic since 1987, first as an editorial assistant, then as consulting editor and finally as co-editor. He has also served on the editorial board of Philosophy and Rhetoric (1996 - 2007) and Argumentation and Advocacy (2007 - ) as well on the board of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (2003 - 2007). When he taught in the Arts and Sciences Program at McMaster University (1992) Hansen was a finalist for the Student Union’s Teaching Award; he was also a member of an award-winning panel at the Central States Communication Association meetings in 2000. In 2004 Hansen received an internal SSHRCC grant from the University of Windsor to study the arguments used by politicians in Canadian federal and provincial elections.
Professor Hansen has edited two books with R. C. Pinto: Fallacies (Penn State Press, 1995) and Reason Reclaimed (Vale Press, 2007). His essays about argumentation and logic have appeared in Synthese, Logique et Analyse, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and Argumentation, as well as Informal Logic. He wrote the entry on rhetoric and logic for Blackwell’s International Encyclopaedia of Communication (2008). Most recently Hansen has edited a volume devoted to a study of the speeches of the Canadian Métis leader, Louis Riel (1844-85) (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2014).
Dr. Hansen’s research centres on the intersection of argumentation and logic. He is interested in identifying and discussing informal theories of logic and inference and in seeing how they might be adapted to argumentation. He also works to recover the history of informal logic that has been left largely unexplored until now. His current research projects are: (1) a study of the methods of informal logic; (2) a study of J. S. Mill’s theory of argumentation; and (3) an investigation of the argumentation behaviour of Canadian politicians.