John Woods

Who is John Woods?

John Hayden Woods is a Canadian logician and philosopher, currently Director of the Abductive Systems Group at the University of British Columbia and The UBC Honorary Professor of Logic. He has also been affiliated with the Group on Logic, Information and Computation, of the Department of Informatics from King's College London, where he hold the Charles S. Peirce Visiting Professorship of Logic position since 2001.

Woods is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Life member of the Association of Fellows of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and President Emeritus of the University of Lethbridge.

Woods education includes an B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto, and a 1965 Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan where his adviser was Arthur Burks.

Together with Douglas Walton, Woods has authored a number of books and papers on fallacies. According to Frans H. van Eemeren, who calls this body of work the Woods-Walton approach, this is "the most continuous and extensive post-Hamblin contribution to the study of fallacies".

A festschrift honoring and discussing Woods' work was published din 2005 by University of Toronto Press; it also contains respondeos of Woods to the various papers and a profile of him in the form of an introduction.