| Charles Arthur Willard | |
| Birth Date: | August 1945 |
| Birth Place: | Hutchinson, Kansas |
| Alma Mater: | University of Illinois |
| Main Interests: | Argumentation theory, rhetoric, modernity, social epistemology, sociology of knowledge |
| Influences: | Joseph W. Wenzel, G. Thomas Goodnight |
| Notable Ideas: | Social grounds of knowledge, argument fields |
Charles Arthur Willard (born 1945) is an American argumentation and rhetorical theorist. He is a retired Professor and University Scholar at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, USA.
He received his undergraduate degree at the Kansas State Teachers College, Emporia, Kansas. He received his master's degree and doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana.
From 1974 to 1982 he was the Director of Forensics at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (USA). He has lectured in Austria, Canada, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. He has studied at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, at Waasner, Holland. He has also taught at Slippery Rock State College and the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
His most important works include Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge (1982) [1] and A Theory of Argumentation (1988).[2] He has published monographs in and served on editorial boards for Communication Monographs, Informal Logic, Journal of the American Forensics Association, Argumentation, Social Epistemology and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. He has published more than 50 articles and book chapters on topics in rhetoric and argumentation. He was one of the founders and for many years was a co-director of the International Association for the Study of Argumentation based at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He has co-edited the proceedings of five of that organization's international conferences. He has recently co-edited with Frans van Eemeren, J. Anthony Blair, and A. Francisca Henkemans Anyone Who Has A View: Theoretical Contributions to the Study of Argumentation. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 2003. He has received distinguished scholarship awards from the National Communication Association, the American Forensics Association, and the Universities of Illinois and Louisville. Four of his books have received the Daniel H. Rohor Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Forensic Association.
His Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy (1996) debunks the discourse of liberalism, arguing that its exaggerated ideals of authenticity, unity, and community have deflected attention from the pervasive incompetence of the rule by experts. He proposes a ground of communication that emphasizes common interests rather than narrow disputes.