Join SCPL and Brock University each month for an engaging and often revelatory dive into history, culture, or the arts. Each month features a different lecture from a Brock University professor.

There is widespread agreement that critical thinking is something we need a lot more of. There is far less agreement about what exactly critical thinking is. Its skills and virtues are often described and taught as individual reasoning skills and virtues. Critical thinking is assimilated to a kind of cognitive rugged individualism, in much popular wisdom – stay off the bandwagon! be sceptical! do your own research! But there are good reasons to regard critical thinking also as a social achievement, requiring trust, deference, and cooperation to be performed reliably. In his Brock Talk, Dr. Kenyon will discuss the roles that social skills and communities play in critical thinking, and how we can help build these for ourselves and others. 

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Dr. Tim Kenyon is Vice-President, Research, of Brock University. He has held research and academic appointments at the University of St. Andrews, University of Alberta, Aberdeen University and, for seventeen years, the University of Waterloo, where he served in a range of roles, receiving the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012. A former President of the Canadian Philosophical Association, he has published award-winning research in critical thinking pedagogy and in social epistemology – the study of how knowledge is situated in and influenced by social and organizational contexts. His research typically focuses on what has recently become known as “non-ideal theory,” or, as he puts it, “paying attention to how things actually happen.” His 2007 book, Clear Thinking in a Blurry World, helped to define a new approach to critical thinking education by emphasizing cognitive, social and structural biases, literacy in science, media operations, and basic applications of probability and statistics. 

This event has been co-organized by the Humanities Research Institute and The Centre for Canadian Studies.