Book Review: “Against Critical Thinking in Health, Social Care and Social Work: Reframing Philosophy for Professional Practice” by Professor Tom Grimwood

Abstract

This article is a review of Dr. Tom Grimwood’s recent book, Against Critical Thinking in Health, Social Care and Social Work: Reframing Philosophy for Professional Practice, published by Routledge (2024). In this book, Grimwood takes the reader through a series of encounters between philosophy and practice, attempting to disrupt the well-established assumptions of critical thinking so that we may better understand criticality for its utility among care practice professionals, and as a mode of understanding. Grimwood’s work is a necessary antidote to the well-established prescriptive and methodological application of how critical thinking has historically been "used" in the caring practice professions, or how it has been persuasive in the kind of understandings it produces. At a time when the contemporary social welfare landscape is becoming increasingly politicized and economized in ways that create societal divisiveness, as was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, current conceptualizations of criticality have left care professionals without a way to bridge misinformation and misunderstanding in their practice. Thus, Grimwood considered his project to be inherently hermeneutical, wanting to remedy the all too familiar divide between theory and practice of critical thinking for practice professionals and in new and reimagined ways for applied hermeneutics.