FYI: GR In Memoriam: John Woods View this email in your browser <https://mailchi.mp/8c0b87e2f741/in-memoriam-john-woods-1937-2024?e=860edf35dc> [image: Header: The Charles S. Peirce Society] Dear Gary Richmond
Our recent newsletters have included an "In Memoriam" section honoring Peircean and pragmatist thinkers who have recently passed. Often, we rely on individuals outside our committee to inform us of such losses. We regret that we had just heard of the passing of one of our own recent presidents, John Woods (1937–2024), after sending out our most recent newsletter. We would like to honor him now in this separate message. John Woods served as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society in 2021, as past president in 2022, and then as a fellow of the Society until his recent death. He was Director of The Abductive Systems Group in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he was also UBC Honorary Professor of Logic. For several years, John held the position of Charles S. Peirce Professor of Logic in the Group on Logic and Computation in what was then called the Department of Computer Science at King’s College London. He conducted pioneering work in five fields—fiction, fallacies, ancient logic, abduction, and the logic of law. *The Logic of Fiction* first appeared in 1974, and his most recent work is *Truth in Fiction* (2018). Between 1972 and 1982, in collaboration with his former student Douglas Walton, the Woods-Walton Approach to the logic of fallacies was developed, and John’s capstone book on that subject, *Errors of Reasoning*, appeared in 2013. In the 1990s, inspired by some remarks that Aristotle made on fallacies, John became more broadly immersed in Aristotle’s logic, leading to the publication of *Aristotle’s Earlier Logic* in 2001, with a second revised edition in 2014. It was recently observed en passant in a critical review of another author that Woods’s “studies on Aristotle’s earlier logic…are arguably the most important achievement in the history of ancient logic in the last half century.” The piece is scheduled to appear in *Transactions* (p. 461). Woods’s work on abduction began in the early 2000s within the Group on Logic and Computation, led by Dov Gabbay. Together, they developed the idea (with an Aristotelian echo) that practical and applied logic needed epistemological refreshment. Their joint works, *Agenda Relevance* (2003) and *The Reach of Abduction* (2005), emerged in due course. The Gabbay-Woods schema for abduction was well-received, and much of the current work on abduction builds upon this schema in interesting ways. John continued to expand the idea in several recent and forthcoming publications. His fifth area of focus was the logic and epistemology of criminal trials in common law, with findings published in *Is Legal Reasoning Irrational?* (2015), with a second expanded edition in 2018. By applying the causal-response epistemology developed in *Errors of Reasoning* and re-tested in *Truth in Fiction*, John felt able to answer the question posed by his title with a resounding ‘No.’ John Woods was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a life member of the Association of Fellows of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. His work was recognized with numerous honors and awards, among his most prized being the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal for research excellence. We have lost another great member of our community of inquirers. But his work will live on. Sincerely, The Charles S. Peirce Society Executive Committee [image: Facebook group] <https://peircesociety.us15.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2d67a1b536f133c3e9f9d5d8c&id=a59a776bc0&e=860edf35dc> [image: Website] <https://peircesociety.us15.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2d67a1b536f133c3e9f9d5d8c&id=ad44589fe1&e=860edf35dc> [image: logo: The Charles S. Peirce Society] *Copyright © 2024 Charles S. Peirce Society, All rights reserved.* You are receiving this message because either you are a member or former member of the Charles S. Peirce Society or you signed up to the previous email list. *Our mailing address is:* Charles S. Peirce Society 140 Commonwealth Ave Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Add us to your address book <https://peircesociety.us15.list-manage.com/vcard?u=2d67a1b536f133c3e9f9d5d8c&id=465a32ebdd> Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences <https://peircesociety.us15.list-manage.com/profile?u=2d67a1b536f133c3e9f9d5d8c&id=465a32ebdd&e=860edf35dc&c=d4bdd1af73> or unsubscribe from this list <https://peircesociety.us15.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=2d67a1b536f133c3e9f9d5d8c&id=465a32ebdd&t=b&e=860edf35dc&c=d4bdd1af73> [image: Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp] <https://login.mailchimp.com/signup/email-referral/?aid=2d67a1b536f133c3e9f9d5d8c>
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