This volume contains 12 papers addressed to researchers and advanced students in informal logic and related fields, such as argumentation, formal logic, and communications. Among the issues discussed are attempts to rethink the nature of argument and of inference, the role of dialectical context, and the standards for evaluating inferences, and to shed light on the interfaces between informal logic and argumentation theory, rhetoric, formal logic and cognitive psychology.

Chapters 1-12 of this volume contain the papers on infonnal logic and argumentation that I've published and/or read at conferences over the last 17 years. These papers are reproduced here pretty much unchanged from their first appearance; it is my intention that their appearance here constitute a record of my positions and arguments at the time of their original publication or delivery. I've made minor changes in fonnat, in the style of references, etc., for the sake of consistency; I've also corrected typographical errors and the like. The only extensive changes in wording occur in the last few pages of Chapter 7, and were made only to enable the reader to see more clearly what I was getting at in my first attempt to write about the notion of coherence. Chapter 13 was written expressly for this volume. It looks retrospectively at the contents of the first 12 chapters and attempts to highlight the unifying themes that run through them. It also revisits the ideas about dialectic that occupied my first in light of later developments in my thinking but also re paper, reworking them emphasizing themes about which I've tended to remain silent in the last few years."

Larry Powers' Non-contradiction is an engaging, innovative, and delightful book. It re-tells the story of Greek philosophy from the novel starting point that Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle took their primary philosophical task to be the defence of the principle of non-contradiction. In the course of nine chapters devoted to ancient Western philosophy we see Powers as the ally of the Greeks, and we get the impression that he sees their project even more clearly than they did. The book also includes a substantial chapter that takes on the challenge of explaining the importance of Hegel to modern analytical philosophers, and another chapter that compares our logical ways with those of ancient Indian and Chinese thinkers, such as Dignaga and Chuang Tsu. Interwoven with Powers' exposition of the history of philosophy is a primer on his own meta-philosophy, a theory devoted to the analysis and resolution of philosophical disagreements. Especially those with an interest in logic and metaphysics will want to study this book: throughout, the argumentation is original, insightful, provocative, persistent and stimulating.

Since 1970, when Charles Hamblin issued a challenge for philosophers, logicians, and educators in general to begin work anew in fallacies, a serious literature on fallacies has indeed developed. Part of this literature deals with the theory of what fallacies are; another part of it contains rigorous analyses of particular fallacies. However, most is still not readily accessible to the researcher, teacher, or student of the field. As a result, the best work on fallacies is not finding its way into the classroom, nor is it informing the educational and intellectual experiences available to most college and university students.

A major purpose of this book is to make the post-Hamblin work on fallacies available to a wider audience in a single, convenient volume. The editors have brought together for the first time the most important historical writings on fallacy theory, from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill, and the most recent and most important theoretical and pedagogical developments in the field since Hamblin's landmark 1970 book. All but a few of the essays included are new contributions for this anthology, and an extensive annotated bibliography is included for researchers and students of fallacies and fallacy theory.