Howard Kahane

Howard Kahane (19 April 1928 – 2 May 2001) was an American professor of philosophy at Bernard M. Baruch College in New York City. He was noted for promoting a popular, and non-mathematical, approach to logic, now known as informal logic. now in the 12th edition, published in 2014.

Another textbook of his that saw posthumous publication is Logic and Philosophy: A Modern Introduction (12th edition in 2012).

Kahane graduated with a master's degree from the University of California at Los Angeles (1958) and received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. Before Baruch College, Kahane taught at Whitman College, the University of Kansas, American University and the University of Maryland at Baltimore.

Linguistics professor Louise Cummings notes that Kahane's book marked a "shift to context", that is, toward pragmatic criteria for evaluating natural language arguments. She cites Van Eemeren, Grootendrost and Henkemans's (of the pragma-dialectic school) observation that thanks to his contextual approach Kahane "added new fallacies to the traditional list, so the one will find not only ad hominem but also 'provincialism', not only ad verecundiam, but also the 'red herring', not only hasty generalization but also 'suppressed evidence'."

Selected publications

Howard Kahane (1969). Logic and Philosophy: A Modern Introduction, Wadsworth Publishing Company, Howard Kahane (1971). Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life, Wadsworth Publishing Company,