In his new book <italic>The Idea of Justice</italic>, Amartya Sen argues that political theory should not consist only in the characterisation of ideal situations of perfect justice. In so doing, Sen is making, within the context of political theory, a similar argument to another he also made in economic theory,...

In this paper the use of mathematics in economics will be discussed, by comparing two approaches to mathematics, a Cartesian approach, and a Newtonian approach. I will argue that while mainstream economics is underpinned by a Cartesian approach which led to a divorce between mathematics and...

This article addresses Piero Sraffa's critique of Alfred Marshall's supply-and-demand framework, and Sraffa's later book Production of Commodities, taking into account an aspect that has been relatively neglected in the literature, namely the ontology underlying the conceptions of Sraffa and...