Author Archives: Rafe

The purpose of  this note is to sketch the similarities between the metaphysical framework that Barry Smith identified as the framework for Carl Menger’s economics and the framework that Popper developed in debate with the physicists. Smith’s story is summarised … Continue reading →

A new entry on Otto Neurath in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some fascinating historical material on the education reform movement in Vienna and the way this involved the philosophers and psychologists and impacted on Popper. Karl Buhler was a key person, … Continue reading →

James Garvey, The Twenty Greatest Philosophy Books  Continuum, London 2006 The authors of the 20 greatest books are Aquinas, Aristotle, Ayer, Berkeley, de Beauvoir, Descarates, Hegel, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Locke, Marx, Mill, Neitzsche, Plato, Popper, Rousseau, Sartre, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. “Popper … Continue reading →

Gene Callahan has kicked off quite a debate with his post on evolutionary epistemology that was noted the other day. There are now over 80 comments. His main point seems to be that EE provides no “warrants” for knowledge approaching … Continue reading →

Alan Chalmers wrote a sensationally successful introductory book on the philosophy of science. What is this thing called science? first appeared in 1976 with revised editions in 1982 and 1999. Translated into fifteen languages it became a bestseller and a … Continue reading →

  This is a modified version of a paper on the philosophy and economics of liberalism. The paper was first written in the 1980s in a competition for a prize awarded by the Mont Pelerin Society. It was revised recently … Continue reading →

A few years John Quiggin and I locked horns over the philosophy of economics. John is a leftwing blogger and he supported the Lakatosian approach, which I contested in a prolonged exchange until I thought I had him on toast. Then … Continue reading →

In the last decade or so some bridges have been built between sociology and ecconomics. This raises the question, why did they separate?  Peter Boettke explored this question in a 1998 paper “Rational Choice and Human Agency in Economics and Sociology: … Continue reading →

Gene Callahan has posted a very strange criticism of EE, inspired by the scholarly but eccentric contrarian John Gray. “This [is] an objection to evolutionary epistemology in all of its forms—that there is no reason whatever for supposing that the … Continue reading →