This essay sets Chicago economics as an example for how today’s economics belittles the importance of explicit philosophical studies. Given that economists keep their methodological stances rather implicit, it is argued that the correct reconstruction of these hidden methodological foundations...

This paper provides a look into what Lucas meant by the term ‘analogue systems’ and how he conceived making them useful. It is argued that any model with remarkable predictive success can be regarded as an analogue system, the term is thus neutral in terms of usefulness. To be useful Lucas...

This introductory paper offers a look into the intellectual and technical progress that led Robert E. Lucas to his seminal paper entitled Expectations and the neutrality of money. It is argued that the neutrality paper applies the capital-theoretic approach of Lucas’s firm microeconomics of...

This paper is an attempt to understand Robert E. Lucas’s microfounded models of the 1960-70s as results of a structuralist project. It is argued that the way Lucas derived macroeconomic outcomes from the decisions of market agents is in line with the basic tenet of the semirealist version of...

Keynes’ ‘fallacy of composition’ and, later, the ‘Santa Fe perspective’ have shown that the economy may be defined as a “complex adaptive system”, since it is not something given but results from constantly developing interactions among heterogeneous individuals. Endorsing the...

There is a striking contrast between the significance of Harold Hotelling’s contribution to industrial economics and the fact that his location model was invalid, unrealistic and non-robust. It is difficult to make sense of the explanatory value of Hotelling’s model based on philosophical...

Adam Smith hat in seinem Bild des Menschen der Rolle der Imagination einen so großen Stellenwert eingeräumt, dass es berechtigt ist, ihn als Bildanthropologen zu bezeichnen. Der Aspekt des Bildvermögens von Menschen geriet im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Geschichte der Wirtschaftstheorie...

Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists - especially Jevons and Walras - viewed...

In the 1870s and 1880s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticized Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate with the editors of The Nation over the...