📚 Reasoning

Inference studied: the formal and the everyday, and the fallacy lists that bridge the two.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject reasoning in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The art of logical thinking	William Walker Atkinson	1909	42
	Mathematics and plausible reasoning	George Pólya	1954	39
	Thinking, Fast and Slow	Daniel Kahneman	2011	36
	The uses of argument	Stephen Edelston Toulmin	1958	25
	Thinking course	Edward de Bono	1982	24
	Critical Thinking	Tracy Bowell	2001	21
	Thought and Change	Ernest Gellner	1964	17
	Learning to philosophise	Eric Revell Emmet	1964	15
	Logic and contemporary rhetoric	Howard Kahane	1971	15
	A practical study of argument	Trudy Govier	1985	13
	Critical thinking and communication	Edward S. Inch	1997	13
	Attacking faulty reasoning	T. Edward Damer	1980	12
	With good reason	S. Morris Engel	1976	11
	Mindware	Richard E. Nisbett	2015	11
	Rationality	Steven Pinker	2021	11
	A preface to philosophy	Mark B. Woodhouse	1975	10
	Argumentation	James A. Herrick	1994	10
	Philosopher's Toolkit	Julian Baggini	2008	10
	The art of thinking clearly	Rolf Dobelli	2013	10
	How to Win an Argument	Michael A. Gilbert	1978	9
	Second Thoughts	Wanda Teays	1995	9
	Inventing Arguments	John Mauk	2005	9
	Practical thinking	Edward de Bono	1971	8
	Understanding arguments	Robert J. Fogelin	1978	8
	A field guide to lies	Daniel J. Levitin	2016	8
	On problem-solving	Karl Duncker	1945	7
	Philosophical reasoning	John Arthur Passmore	1961	7
	Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft	Max Horkheimer	1967	7
	Thinking about thinking	Antony Flew	1975	7
	Understanding scientific reasoning	Ronald N. Giere	1979	7

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 05 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.