Stephen Toulmin, a Philosopher and Educator, Dies at 87 Stephen Toulmin, an influential philosopher who conducted wide-ranging inquiries into ethics, science and moral reasoning and developed a new approach to analyzing arguments known as the Toulmin model of argumentation, died on Dec. 4 in Los Angeles. The cause was heart failure, said his son Greg. Mr. Toulmin, a disciple of Ludwig Wittgenstein, earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics, and throughout his long philosophical career showed a marked inclination to ground his ideas in real-world situations. In the introduction to a 1986 edition of his first book, "An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics" (1950), he wrote that "having been trained as a natural scientist, I had always hoped to relate philosophical issues to practical experience, and could never wholly side with Hume the philosopher against Hume the backgammon player." His bent, he wrote, was toward "practical moral reasoning." Although he wrote on disparate topics like the history of science, international relations, medical ethics and Wittgenstein's Vienna, he was best known for "The Uses of Argument," published in 1958. In it, he criticized formal logic as an overly abstract, inadequate representation of how human beings actually argue. He also challenged its claims to universality, as well as its faith in absolute truth and moral certainty. "Stephen's essential contribution was to bring philosophy back from the abstractions of reason and logic - the world of Plato and Descartes - to the human condition," said Roy Pea, a professor of learning sciences and education and the director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning at Stanford University. He argued that if we want to understand questions of ethics, science and logic, we have to inquire into the everyday situations in which they arise. Stephen Edelston Toulmin was born on March 25, 1922, in London. After graduating from King's College, Cambridge, in 1942, he worked as a scientific officer with the Ministry of Aircraft Production, posted to the Malvern radar research center in Britain and later to Allied headquarters in Germany. He returned to Cambridge after the war and studied philosophy under Wittgenstein and John Wisdom, earning his doctorate in moral sciences in 1948. He then taught at Oxford and the University of Leeds and in 1960 became the director of the Nuffield Foundation's Unit for the History of Ideas in London. Mr. Toulmin's interest in the history of ideas, particularly scientific ideas, led to several influential books, most notably "The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction" (1953) and a series he wrote with his second wife, June Goodfield: "The Fabric of the Heavens" (1961), "The Architecture of Matter" (1962) and "The Discovery of Time" (1965). His most important work in this vein was "Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry Into the Aims of Science" (1961), a book often mentioned in the same breath as Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." He later re-examined this subject more broadly in "Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts" (1972), applying a Darwinian model, rather than Kuhn's revolutionary model of paradigm shifts, to explain changes in how the human mind forms representations of the world. In addition to his son Greg, of McLean, Va., he is survived by his fourth wife, Donna; a sister, Rachel Toulmin of Padua, Italy; three other children, Polly Macinnes of Skye, Scotland, Camilla Toulmin of London and Matthew Toulmin of Melbourne, Australia; and 13 grandchildren. Mr. Toulmin's provocative ideas often encountered resistance at first, especially in Britain, and his work on argument was no exception. He proposed, instead of formal logic's three-part syllogism, a model of persuasive argument consisting of six components. Some, he maintained, apply universally but others do not. Arguments, in other words, do not unfold in a Platonic ether, but in particular contexts. The Toulmin model proved to be highly useful for analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments. It is commonly used in debate manuals, for example, but its applications have extended to the rhetorical interpretation of literary texts, computer science and artificial intelligence. Mr. Toulmin moved to the United States in 1965. After teaching at Brandeis, Michigan State University, the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, he accepted a professorship at the Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies at the University of Southern California in 1993. He retired this summer. In the United States he published some of his most venturesome, speculative works. In "Wittgenstein's Vienna" (1973), written with Allan Janik, he examined the ideas and cultural currents that shaped Wittgenstein's thought. "Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity" (1989) surveyed 400 years of struggle between the intellectual systematizers like Descartes, in search of certainty and order, and freewheeling humanists like Montaigne, at ease with diversity and change. "He was an intellectual giant, a true Renaissance man," said Uffe Juul Jensen, a philosophy professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. Like Wittgenstein, he believed that philosophy should not be a scholastic discipline, with philosophers just analyzing the works and arguments of other philosophers.