Stephen Toulmin was born in London, UK, on 25 March 1922 to Geoffrey Edelson Toulmin and Doris Holman Toulmin. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from
King's College, Cambridge, in 1943, where he was a
Cambridge Apostle. Soon after, Toulmin was hired by the
Ministry of Aircraft Production as a junior scientific officer, first at the Malvern Radar Research and Development Station and later at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Germany. At the end of
World War II, he returned to England to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1947 and a PhD in philosophy from
Cambridge University, subsequently publishing his dissertation as
An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950). While at Cambridge, Toulmin came into contact with the Austrian philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose examination of the relationship between the uses and the
meanings of
language shaped much of Toulmin's own work. After graduating from Cambridge, he was appointed University Lecturer in
Philosophy of Science at
Oxford University from 1949 to 1954, during which period he wrote a second book,
The Philosophy of Science: an Introduction (1953). Soon after, he was appointed to the position of Visiting Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at
Melbourne University in Australia from 1954 to 1955, after which he returned to England, and served as Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Leeds from 1955 to 1959. While at Leeds, he published one of his most influential books in the field of rhetoric,
The Uses of Argument (1958), which investigated the flaws of traditional
logic. Although it was poorly received in England and satirized as "Toulmin's anti-logic book" by Toulmin's fellow philosophers at Leeds, the book was applauded by the rhetoricians in the United States, where Toulmin served as a visiting professor at
New York,
Stanford, and
Columbia Universities in 1959. While in the States, Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger introduced Toulmin's work to communication scholars, as they recognized that his work provided a good structural model useful for the analysis and criticism of rhetorical arguments. In 1960, Toulmin returned to London to hold the position of director of the Unit for
History of Ideas of the
Nuffield Foundation. In 1965, Toulmin returned to the United States, where he held positions at various universities. In 1967, Toulmin served as literary executor for close friend
N.R. Hanson, helping in the posthumous publication of several volumes. While at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, Toulmin published
Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972), which examines the causes and the processes of
conceptual change. In this book, Toulmin uses a novel comparison between conceptual change and
Charles Darwin's model of
biological evolution to analyse the process of conceptual change as an evolutionary process. The book confronts major philosophical questions as well. In 1973, while a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he collaborated with
Allan Janik, a philosophy professor at
La Salle University, on the book ''Wittgenstein's Vienna'', which advanced a thesis that underscores the significance of history to human reasoning: Contrary to philosophers who believe the absolute truth advocated in
Plato's idealized
formal logic, Toulmin argues that truth can be a relative quality, dependent on historical and cultural contexts (what other authors have termed "conceptual schemata"). From 1975 to 1978, he worked with the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, established by the
United States Congress. During this time, he collaborated with Albert R. Jonsen to write
The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), which demonstrates the procedures for resolving moral cases. One of his most recent works,
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990), written while Toulmin held the position of the Avalon Foundation Professor of the
Humanities at
Northwestern University, specifically criticizes the practical use and the thinning
morality underlying modern science. Toulmin held distinguished professorships at a number of different universities, including
Columbia,
Dartmouth College,
Michigan State,
Northwestern,
Stanford, the
University of Chicago, and the
University of Southern California School of International Relations. In 1997 the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) selected Toulmin for the
Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the
humanities. His lecture, "A Dissenter's Story" (alternatively entitled "A Dissenter's Life"), discussed the roots of
modernity in
rationalism and
humanism, the "contrast of the reasonable and the rational", and warned of the "abstractions that may still tempt us back into the dogmatism, chauvinism and sectarianism our needs have outgrown". The NEH report of the speech further quoted Toulmin on the need to "make the technical and the humanistic strands in modern thought work together more effectively than they have in the past". On 2 March 2006 Toulmin received the
Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. He was married four times, once to
June Goodfield, with whom he collaborated on a series of books on the
history of science. His children are Greg, of McLean, Va., Polly Macinnes of Skye, Scotland,
Camilla Toulmin in the UK and Matthew Toulmin of Melbourne, Australia. On 4 December 2009 Toulmin died of a heart failure at the age of 87 in Los Angeles, California. ==Meta-philosophy==