From the editors 
This issue illustrates in a nice way the 

internationalization and interdisciplinary 
spread of informal logic. Paul Healy, 
Jonathan Berg and Michael Wreen all 
work in philosophy departments-
informal logic's traditional home turf-
but Healy's is in Ireland, Berg's in Israel 
and Wreen's in the U.S.A. Sharon Bailin, 
a philosopher of education, is based in 
a faculty of education, and Marie Secor, 
who has written on composition and 
rhetoric, is in an English department. 

While two book reviews is hardly a 
flood, it is a trickle that we hope 
presages a steady stream. We are pleas-
ed to have the van Eemeren, Grooten-
dorst and Kruiger handbook brought to 
your attention by James Freeman's 
review, and to have Irving Copi's long-
awaited foray into informal logic review-
ed by Wayne Grennan. There surely are 
a number of informal logic and critical 
thinking textbooks deserving serious 
review, and there's a growing number of 
monographs that merit public discus-
sion. Now that informal logic is 
publishing regularly again, we hope you 
will take up keyboard and printout and 
send for publication your considered 
judgements about these books. 

Although this journal has been 
delayed (a delay now over), the scholar-
ly and teaching activity in informal logic 
and critical thinking has been booming. 
In 1988 we count at least ten conferences 
in this and closely related fields: AILACT 
sessions at the APA regional meetings 
and at the CPA congress, the first British 
conference on informal logic and critical 
thinking, the McMaster conference on 
teaching, the Newport News critical 
thinking conference, the biggest ever 

Sonoma conference on critical thinking 
and moral critique, the joint 
AILACT/ISSA session at the World Con-
gress of Philosophy in Brighton, the 
Venice argumentation conference and 
the Montclair State critical thinking 
conference. 

The reason we speak of informal 
logic's being on a regular schedule again 
is that we have recently been provided 
by the University of Windsor with the 
funding to hire an assistant to the 
editors. We extend a warm welcome to 
Hans Hansen, who is working on a 
dissertation in ethics at Wayne State 
University when not toiling in our office 
and becoming intrigued by informal 
logic. Since Hans began working for us 
in August, amazing things have started 
to happen. A publishing schedule has 
been set, and if the catch -up proceeds 
at the present rate (there's no reason 
why it cannot), we should be up to date 
by early summer, 1989. Welcome 
aboard, Hans. Those readers who have 
been holding back subscriptions or ar-
ticles for fear that informal logic was 
defunct or would not come out regular-
ly can now be encou raged to renew or 
submit. 

Finally, a note about dating. We shall 
be catching up on past volumes in order 
and according to the calendar year and 
seasons when they should have ap-
peared. Hence, this issue-Vol. IX, No. 
1, Winter 1987-is in fact appearing in 
the early autumn of 1988. It is, thus, not 
Michael Scriven's ability to transcend 
time that allows his note of September 
1988 to appear in this Winter 1987 issue. 
We hope Scriven's note elicits responses 
for publication. 0