Die Begriffe Wohlfahrt und Wohlstand werden in ihrem dogmenhistorischen Entstehungskontext untersucht. Dabei wird zum einen der Schwerpunkt auf die von den Physiokraten, aber auch von John Stuart Mill, W. Stanley Jevons und sogar von deutschen Ordoliberalen thematisierten Wachstumsgrenzen gelegt...

Adam Smith is commonly referred to as one of the first who thought of foreign trade in terms of an international division of labour, whereby each country specialises in the production of certain goods. It is argued that he made a strong case for foreign trade on this basis. In this article, I...

Adam Smith’s version of Virtue Ethics can be traced directly back to Plato (Socrates) and Aristotle. Smith basically skipped Aquinas and Augustine because they were also Catholic theologians, as well as philosophers. Referencing them would not have been looked upon kindly by the Scottish...

Eight centuries ago, Thomas Aquinas clearly differentiated between probability and uncertainty in decision making. He viewed probability eclectically as having elements that involved propositions about events, frequency of events, and single events. He found an important role in his approach for...

The economics profession has completely mixed up Adam Smith’s definition of self-interest, by which Smith means the absolute necessity of successfully applying the Virtue of Prudence, with Jeremy Bentham’s directly conflicting definition of self-interest, which is the Vice of Greed,...

Frank P Ramsey did not consider the possibility of representing the concept of probability by an interval valued approach in his lifetime. Ramsey considered probability to be either ordinal or numerical. There was absolutely no room for interval estimates and interval probability in his...

Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian tracts The Principles of Morals and Legislation and In Defense of Usury contains an explicit attack on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations on pages 8-23 in chapter Two of The Principles of Morals and Legislation, as well as on...

The claim made to Robert Skidelsky by Richard Kahn, published in Skidelsky’s 1992 second volume of his autobiography of Keynes, that “…he recalled Keynes himself as being a poor mathematician by 1927…”, is in direct conflict with Kahn’s 1936 reply to Neisser, that "My own ideas were...

The Townshend–Keynes exchanges over decision making, weight of the argument (evidence), non numerical probabilities (Keynes’s term for Boole’s constituent probabilities, used in The Laws of Thought in 1854, that appears on page 163 of the A Treatise on Probability in chapter 15 on inexact...

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provided a general analysis of virtue ethics (prudence, temperance, courage, justice, benevolence, where Smith combined the virtues of temperance and courage into the virtue of self command) that was applied to all areas of a human society...