Librarian and archivist Antoinette Seymour looking through archives found in the Philosophy Department at the University of Windsor. (Lindsay Charlton/ University of Windsor)
By Lindsay Charlton
Brushing the dust off and sifting through some old boxes during a bit of spring cleaning led one staff member to discover pieces of departmental history tucked away in her new office.
Monique Ritz took over the role of undergraduate program and student support secretary last October. While cleaning out her new office, she came across boxes filled with books, papers, a CBC Radio-Canada tape and other archival materials connected to the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (FAHSS).
“The person in the role before me was in it for many years, and she had a ton of file boxes; one I came across looked really old and yellowed, so I thought there could be something really golden in here,” Ritz said.
She said she went through the boxes with Department of Philosophy head Phillip Rose and identified several items with historical value to the University, including original papers by professor emeritus Dr. Tony Blair.
A professor in the University of Windsor’s Department of Philosophy from 1967 until his retirement in 2006, Blair, who died in 2024, earned international recognition for his research in informal logic and argumentation theory, establishing himself as a leading figure in the field.
“His work is now being studied in curricula around the world,” said philosophy professor Christopher Tindale.
“Informal logic was not even part of North American curricula before he and Ralph Johnson developed it, but now their ideas are studied. We recently heard a talk on informal logic in China about the impact Tony had there and the way it’s now being taught across the country. That’s true of virtually every continent. It’s a big Windsor success story.”
Tindale explained that informal logic emerged as a response to a time when formal, mathematical logic dominated the discipline. The field focused on understanding and evaluating the kinds of arguments and reasoning people use in everyday life.
“So that's their innovation: they came up with criteria for evaluating these kinds of arguments, rather than formal arguments,” he said.
The timing of Ritz’s discovery was especially fitting. Shortly after she uncovered the materials, leading figures in informal logic were gathering on campus as stewardship of the journal Informal Logic transitioned to the University of Lethbridge.
Founded by Blair and Johnson at the University of Windsor in 1978, the open-access academic journal had been published by UWindsor faculty for decades.
Among those visitors was Takuzo Konishi, a former student of Blair’s and now a professor of international liberal arts at Showa Women’s University in Japan and an expert in informal logic.
"The University of Windsor was one of the main engines behind the informal logic movement. It became one of the key centres for philosophical research in argumentation,” he said.
The discovery led Ritz to reach out to UWindsor’s Archives and Special Collections after recognizing Blair’s name in a 1978 paper, the same year Informal Logic was first published.
“It was cool to see these old items. It’s not something you stumble on online — it’s tangible. You can really look at it and feel that there is something here, knowing these are the originals of a concept and philosophy,” Ritz said.
Antoinette Seymour, Leddy Library archivist and librarian, said Ritz’s box of discovery is still being processed, but she’s already identified not only philosophy-specific materials but also broader institutional records.
She urges others who may stumble upon some relics to follow Ritz’s lead and contact Archives and Special Collections.
“We are proactively trying to build our collections. All of this is valuable for research,” Seymour said.
“I love to say it — archivists preserve culture, heritage, history, identity, legacy, memory, value and evidence. That's why this is so rich. This is evidence.”
While processing another collection related to J.F. Leddy, former University of Windsor president, Seymour came across Senate papers documenting early debates over bringing computers to campus. One professor even warned the machines were "demonic."
As part a broader effort, archivists are leading an ongoing campaign to encourage departments and units across campus to transfer any archival records they may have to the growing institutional records collection at Leddy Library.
"Call us and let us make a site visit to determine what should come back to the archives. There's so much waiting to be discovered,” Seymour said. “What Monique found and described, for instance, wasn't even on our radar.”
For Ritz, the discovery reinforced the value of looking twice before throwing history away.
“With the purging came the discovery, right?” she said. “And that's where you win.”
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