Dr. Anthony Laden

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)

Keynote address title: "The Justice of Justification"

Prof. Laden teaches philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996. He works in moral and political philosophy, where his research focuses on liberalism, democratic theory, feminism and the politics of identity, and the nature of practical reason and reasoning. He also has interests in the history of moral and political philosophy, especially Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. He is the author of Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity, (Cornell University Press, 2001), and the co-editor (with David Owen) of Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge, 2007). He is currently at work on a collection of essays on the work of John Rawls as well as a book on reasoning, relationships and idle conversation. In the future, he wants to figure out if human rights need philosophical foundations, and what role experts play in a democracy.