This theoretical study is based on the fact that critical thinking is part of the key competences and specifically civic competences, but it is not defined in detail in curriculum documents. Critical thinking is close to philosophical thinking. For the development of philosophical thinking, a competency-based approach is applied in foreign didactics of philosophy to define the objectives of the discipline. This study attempts to show that the competency-based approach is also suitable for the development of critical thinking in the context of teaching civics and social studies; it is thus necessary to know what critical thinking consists of. Therefore, the first aim of the study is to specify in more detail what critical thinking is, based on an analysis of two foreign conceptions of critical thinking, with an emphasis on its subcomponents. The second aim is to compare critical and philosophical thinking more closely and to show how a critical thinking perspective could enrich the existing elaboration of philosophical competencies. Given the similarity of these two ways of thinking, the author proposes that one of the goals of high school philosophy education should be the explicit development of critical thinking and that the skills, dispositions and knowledge needed for critical thinking should be taken into account in the specification of competency-based goals for philosophy education.