John Woods (logician)


John Hayden Woods is a Canadian logician and philosopher. He currently holds the position of Director of the Abductive Systems Group at the University of British Columbia and is The UBC Honorary Professor of Logic. He is also affiliated with the Group on Logic, Information and Computation within the Department of Informatics at King's College London where he has held the Charles S. Peirce Visiting Professorship of Logic position since 2001.
Woods is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, life member of the Association of Fellows of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and President Emeritus of the University of Lethbridge.
Woods' education includes a BA and MA in philosophy from the University of Toronto, and a 1965 PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan where his adviser was Arthur Burks.
Together with Douglas N. Walton, Woods has authored a number of books and papers on fallacies. According to Frans H. van Eemeren, who calls this body of work the Woods–Walton approach, this is "the most continuous and extensive post-Hamblin contribution to the study of fallacies".
A festschrift honoring and discussing Woods' work was published in 2005 by the University of Toronto Press. The book includes s of Woods to the various papers contained in the book and a profile of Woods in the form of an introduction written by Kent Peacock and Andrew Irvine.

Selected books

Moreover, Woods has been a co-editor of the eleven-volume Handbook of the History of Logic, published by North-Holland, as well as editor, with Gabbay and Paul Thagard, of the sixteen-volume Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, by the same publisher.