Reasoning

Simone Chambers, Contemporary Political Theory This is a deeply thought and beautifully crafted book ... It offers a serious and substantial challenge to much contemporary thinking about reason in philosophy. But true to its ideal, Laden does not present it as a challenge but as an invitation to engage in some real reasoning about how we should understand the activity of reasoning

Titus Stahl, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Laden's argument is extremely rich in content and introduces a wide range of novel arguments, making this book not only one of the most interesting recent additions to the literature about social conceptions of rationality, but also genuinely enjoyable to read ... it combines a great number of challenging ideas with an extraordinarily clear line of argument; it certainly will play a major role in the discussion of social theories of reasoning and deliberation. It is an important contribution which will put a number of questions on the philosophical agenda for some time to come.

Jonathan Havercroft, Political Theory Laden has offered us a very detailed and compelling social picture of reasoning . . . path-breaking.

<br>Anthony Simon Laden is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Cornell, 2001) and co-editor, with David Owen, of Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge, 2007). He has written numerous articles on reasoning, deliberation, democratic theory, and the work of John Rawls.<br>

Preface and Acknowledgements; PART I: AN ALTERNATIVE PICTURE; Prologue; 1. The Initial Sketch; 2. Authority; 3. The Rational Significance of Conversation; PART II: REASONING TOGETHER; 4. Norms of Conversation; 5. Reasoning as Responsive Conversation; 6. Engaged Reasoning; PART III: RESPONDING; 7. Responding Reasonably; 8. Reasonable Responses; 9. Intelligible Responses; Bibliography