Critical Thinking by Moore and Parker

10th edition of 2012 and 11th edition of 2014

There is an even newer edition published, but I do not have it. In the same time I can compare two previous editions to look for their differences. After that I can conclude what can we expect from the 12th edition and is it worth buying if you have an older edition.

This is a good textbook for learning critical thinking. It can be used as a sole source of information of with a number or other books and courses. The authors give a number of examples to illustrate different topics from the book. It is also the main difference between editions, authors updated their examples and references to real-life events. I am not sure it is worth publishing a new edition every two or three years, but it also means that smaller error are probably corrected and that authors continue to teach critical thinking and improve their course. Publisher also promises a better integration with its online teaching platform, but I focus only on the book here.

The book covers the following topics: what critical thinking covers, deductive and inductive thinking, credibility, rhetoric, thinking biases and logical fallacies. It also goes into more detailed explanation of categorial logic, truth-functional logic, and forms of inductive reasoning. Finally the book covers moral, legal, and aesthetic reasoning in comparison with critical thinking.

The organization of the book is good, it has short and long tables of content, it also has clearly structured chapters. If you don’t want to learn all the topics you can easily select only a number of them. Every third or fourth exercise has an answer, so you can check yourself. You can also use exercises without answers to do them yourself or you can invite a friend to do the same exercises and discuss answers.

The book can be a good choice for a beginner. If you have some knowledge of critical thinking the book can also help, you can skip some topics and work only on things you haven’t learned yet. The book can also be used to refresh your knowledge, exercises can be especially helpful here. There is about the same number of pages with exercises as the pages with theory. I can also advice that if you are going to invest into the book, you can check earlier editions first, especially 10th and 11th. I expect them to be as good as the most recent one.