During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The younger Menger never finished the work. While working in the Menger collections at Duke University's David M....

The present paper considers the implications of the postulate that the activities of scientists constitute complex phenomena in the sense associated with the methodological writings of the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist, methodologist, and political philosopher, F.A. Hayek. Although...

There is something extreme about Mises' apriorism, namely, his epistemological justification of the a priori element(s) of economic theory. His critics have long recognized and attacked the extremeness of Mises' epistemology of a priori knowledge. However, several of his defenders have glossed...

The present essay investigates F.A. Hayek's epistemology and his methodology of sciences of complex phenomena for implications relevant to an explanation of Hayek's own socalled "epistemic turn." The thesis defended here is that Hayek's dissatisfaction with his technical economics - in...

From the early-1950s on, F.A. Hayek was concerned with the development of a methodology of sciences that study systems of complex phenomena. Hayek argued that the knowledge that can be acquired about such systems is, in virtue of their complexity (and the comparatively narrow boundaries of human...

It is generally accepted that F.A. Hayek gave up the business cycle as an object of theoretical investigation following the publication of 1941's The Pure Theory of Capital. The present paper aims to cast a shade of doubt upon this received view. Many of Hayek's philosophical writings bear...

The paper examines one of the considerations that determines the extent to which policymakers pursue the objectives demanded by constituents. The nature and extent of their ignorance serve to determine the incentives confronted by policymakers to pursue their constituents' demands. The paper...

The method appropriate to the historical and conceptual investigation of Hayek’s ideas is implicit in his own writings on the methodology of disciplines that study complex phenomena. The phenomena of Hayek’s career are complex phenomena requiring a method appropriate to this complexity.

Little is known about the relationship between Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of Economics and one of the three fathers of marginal utility theory, and Karl Menger, whose Vienna Mathematical Colloquium was crucial to the development of mathematical economics. The present paper...

Whatever F.A. Hayek meant by "knowledge" could not have been the justified true belief conception common in the Western intellectual tradition from at least the time of Plato onward. In this brief note, I aim to uncover and succinctly state Hayek's unique definition of knowledge.