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"history of thought"
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Knowing what we know : the transmission of knowledge, from ancient wisdom to modern magic
Examining such disciplines as education, journalism, encyclopedia creation, museum curation, photography and broadcasting, an award-winning writer explores how humans have attained, stored, and disseminated knowledge.
Book
Anthropological archaeology and the Viennese students of civilization
In this paper, I explore the parallel trajectories of anthropological archaeological and Austrian economic thought from central Europe to the Anglosphere. I note the work of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992). Tracing the influence that similar theoretical perspectives has had on their respective fields, I particularly investigate the concept of methodological individualism within American archaeology in the twentieth century. This work therefore is a general abstract for the various points of contact between Austrian Economics and anthropological archaeology over the course of their intellectual histories.
Journal Article
The puzzler : one man's quest to solve the most baffling puzzles ever, from crosswords to jigsaws to the meaning of life
\"The New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically goes on a journey to understand the enduring power of puzzles: why we love them, what they do to our brains, and how they can improve our world\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Unmixing the metaphors of Austrian capital theory
A complement of metaphors inherited from the classical era has held back progress in Austrian capital theory (ACT). In particular, the attachment to circulating capital as the paradigmatic capital good, largely motivated by the business cycle theory, has locked ACT into a nonoperational point-output model of production. This paper draws out a distinct flow-output approach from work by Lachmann, Lewin, and Cachanosky, contrasts its associated metaphors and paradigms with those of the canonical Hayek-Garrison model, and argues that the former has the potential to bolster both the analytical coherence and the empirical relevance of ACT that it has so far found elusive. By focusing on the investment project rather than the capital good as the object of planmaking, the flow-output approach affirms the core appeal of ACT – a heterogeneous capital structure and a market process approach – by declaring independence from the business cycle theory.
Journal Article
Schumpeter's conceptions of process and order
This article scrutinises the conceptions of process and order present in Schumpeter's substantive writings. To facilitate a detailed understanding of his position, his work is examined from different angles, in three successive 'approximations'. The coherence, or mismatch, of Schumpeter's conceptions is subsequently discussed. The article argues that Schumpeter's essay on social classes provides an ontologically grounded theory of process which is also a theory of reproduced order and that this theory does not fit well with Schumpeter's alternative conception of order as equilibrium. His methodological commitment to an orthodox notion of order as equilibrium is shown to be the source of pervasive tensions in his writings, here classified as 'retroductive problems' and 'spurious problems'.
Journal Article
Piero Sraffa’s Use of the History of Economic Thought in the Cambridge Lectures
Attention to the history of economic thought and its connection with historical and political conditions played a crucial role in the evolution of Sraffa’s theoretical positions. Sraffa insisted on the importance of this methodological approach to the study of economic theory in his first lectures on advanced theory of value, delivered at Cambridge in the late 1920s. He saw the evolution of economic theory as the result of attempts by economists to deal with ‘practical problems’ and affected as such by the ‘disturbing elements’ of ‘opposite interests’supporting different solutions. This view still deserves attention.
Journal Article
The fate of place
In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, The Fate of Place is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray.
eBook
The nature of central banking
In this article we argue that we can more easily understand the duality of central banks (CBs) and independent central banks (ICBs) through an understanding of their underlying dualities. As we explore, heterodox and orthodox views and methodologies present two distinct ways of conceptualizing all that is involved in economic activity, and correspond to a social interpretation and a market interpretation of economics. This clear dividing line can be traced between visions of individuals, society, money and banking, and indeed central banking and independent central banking. As we will show, CBs and ICBs have well recognized – but poorly classified – distinctions that allow for a clear separation between their natures. Once revealed as quite distinct institutions, the public policy decision of maintaining independent central banks more fully aligns with the disastrous history of such institutions on the well being of national economies.
Journal Article
Schumpeter's theory of self-restoration: a casualty of Samuelson's Whig historiography of science
This article argues that Samuelson's influential 1987 call for a 'Whig history of economic science' rests on a Whig historiography of the natural sciences. This contrasts with how science actually works: Samuelson neglects the critical role of controversy in the development of knowledge, leading to the misleading idea that scientists pursue discovery at the expense of reflection on the foundation and history of their subject. The consequence is institutional delegitimation: the exclusion of legitimate contrary hypotheses when economists test their theories, invalidating the test. Samuelson further confuses the history of ideas with the history of texts. This expands the scope of institutional delegitimation to a systematic misrepresentation of the actual ideas at stake in the economic controversies, erecting a permanent obstacle to the discovery of truth. I illustrate this with Samuelson's exclusion from consideration of two 'non-ignorable' contributions to macroeconomic theory: Schumpeter's Business Cycles, which he failed to recognise as a theory of endogenous capitalist self-restoration, and the concept of endogenous decline, excluded by his Whig reinterpretation of Marx's theory of value. Schumpeter and Marx offered opposed, but legitimate, alternatives to the post-war macroeconomic consensus of which Samuelson was a major architect. In particular, both recognised that deep and prolonged crises were a natural product of capitalism, not an inexplicable exception. To respond to the 2008 downturn, economics needs to reopen a wide discussion without excluding, a priori, any of these opposed theoretical explanations, instead seeking to understand clearly what each of them actually says and testing them against the empirical evidence of history.
Journal Article
Discovery processes, science, and ‘knowledge–how:’ Competition as a discovery procedure in the laboratory
These edited remarks explore the relationship of the thought of F.A. Hayek to the development of experimental economics and related programs in economic design. Particularly emphasized are the insights of Hayek with respect to competition and their importance to the theoretical justification for, and empirical results derived from, the experimental study of market behavior. These remarks include some personal commentary on experimental methods, from the early double auctions of the 1960s through more recent work exploring the nature of business cycles. Finally, the intellectual history of the market structures examined in Vernon Smith’s work is discussed, comparing the exploration of the double auction to the horse market of Bohm-Bawerk, as well as the general insight of Adam Smith that causality stems from the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange to the discovery of specialization.
Journal Article