Critical Thinking in Scholarship

Critical thinking is a vital part of scholarship, yetthe meaning of this notion and the conditions itpresupposes are far from self-evident. In fact,critical thinking is understood in a number of ways,and depending on which meaning the notion of criticalthinking is associated to, different conditions forits realization can be envisaged. Thus, in this booksome of these meanings and conditions are explored,seeing the development of critical thinking both inrelation to history and to contemporary lines ofthought. It appears that critical thinking is amatter of dealing with abstract relationships, andthat the scholarly critical thinker is directedtowards mastering, understanding, or changing theworld. Moreover, it emerges that critical thinking inscholarship is implicitly understood as a means forattaining normatively good ends. This is problematic,since critical thinking involves no assurance ofending in something good in itself. Therefore, it isargued that scholarly critical thinking receives itsmost critical feature when the intention, process andend constitute an interrelated constructive whole,which is permeated by the individual s sense ofresponsibility.