This work offers the first comprehensive comparison between the philosophy of Adam Smith and that of his successor, Thomas Reid. It looks at Reid's and Smith's remarkably similar accounts of human perception and judgement, and at their different moral and economic theories. In this way, this...

As with many philosophers of the modern period, Smith's thought was highly influenced by the advent of modern, Newtonian physics as well as by the so-called mechanistic worldview. However, the adoption of this theoretical paradigm leads to an aporia, i. e., to a fundamental problem, within...

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued against the account of human nature which views moral sentiments as deriving from self-love. This paper emphasises that Smith's understanding of human nature was not that it was either selfish or benevolent. Human nature consists of the ability to...

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.Following on from The Hand Behind the Invisible Hand and A Realist Philosophy of Economics, this new book drawn from Karl Mittermaier's writings examines the intricate relationship between economic theory and real-world economic...

This article introduces the ordonomic research program and explains its methodological roots. It shows how a German-speaking line of tradition has developed from Order Economics (Ordnungsökonomik) through Order Ethics (Ordnungsethik) to Ordonomics (Ordonomik). Ordonomics integrates central...

This article examines the interpretation of Adam Smith's writings in The Birth of Biopolitics, where Foucault delves into market processes, the government's role, the nature of economic knowledge, the dynamics of the "invisible hand," and the complex relationship between society and the state....

"In recent years there have been increasing calls for a revision of the economics curriculum to address the most pressing and challenging issues facing society. This erudite Handbook bridges the gap between a flourishing body of scholarship in the philosophy of economics literature and an...

Biographical note: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath is Professor and Permanent Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt and a principal researcher at the COEVOLVERS project.

The article discusses the ongoing debate about a potential paradigm shift in eco-nomics. Institutions like the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the New Economics Foundation, and the Forum New Economy have been established to foster new approaches to understanding and transforming economies....

About the necessity and usefulness of developing a philosophy specific to the blockchain technology, emphasizing on the ontological aspects. After an Introduction that highlights the main philosophical directions for this emerging technology, in Blockchain Technology I explain the way the...

The evolution of history as an academic discipline began in the 19th century. The role of the German historians in making the discipline cannot be underestimated as Leopold von Ranke is deemed the ‘father of history’. The impeccable role of the father of Sociology, Auguste Comte can also not...

Adam Smith does not focus on the creation of an ideal world, but on the understanding that societal changes for the better are an unintentional product of commerce. Furthermore, as if to highlight the concreteness of these changes, he sees population growth as the way to measure this betterment...

This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

This article argues that the current crisis of environmental degradation and global inequality is caused by the dominance of the philosophical principles of individualism and neo-liberalism in public and private economic decision-making since the 1970s. This crisis can be overcome by a...

In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), G.W. F. Hegel argues that in order for self-consciousness to develop independence, he must subject another form of self-consciousness to dependence by means of consumption or domination in a death-and-life struggle. The battle for independence between these...

Adam Smith sees religion both as having a useful and a dangerous role. People create gods to explain what they do not understand and appease their desire of justice when human justice is perceived to fail. These are socially useful functions of religion. But when religion is used as a political...

This article comprises an up-to-date critical review of the field known as Economic Methodology or Philosophy of Economics (EM/PE). Two edited volumes (Kincaid and Ross 2021; Heilmann and Reiss 2021), a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology (2021), and a recent bibliometric analysis...

Experimental philosophy, as practiced by political philosophers, has tended to use experimental methods to gain leverage on traditional normative and political questions. Typically, these methods are the same ones used in cognitive and social psychology, which is to say non-incentivized,...

The subject of this paper is how the epistemic limitations of individuals and their biases in reasoning affect collective decisions and in particular the functioning of democracies. In fact, while the cognitive sciences have largely shown how the imperfections of human rationality shape...

Tony Lawson, the leading figure of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group, recently published a series of papers devoted to the question of the nature of money. These contributions have to be understood in the context of his broader approach to social ontology, the so called social positioning...

Adam Smith included understanding and belonging among basic human needs. Humans have spiritual and material needs that they can satisfy through coordination and cooperation, both need communication. Religion and philosophy emerge when people communicate the explanations they have of their...