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“MARGINAL MEN”: WEIMER ON HAYEK

Here is Walt Weimer’s brief but valued contribution to Hayek in Mind. Wiemer did so much to bring Hayek’s philosophical psychology to the wider world – and for that we are deeply indebted to him. It’s still really worth checking out Weimer’s work. Occasionally I am asked how I came to the work of Friedrich…

Clash of the Titans: When the Market and Science Collide

Coming soon the first of three papers I’ve co-authored with Dave Hardwick, this one due in Advances in Austrian Economics, Vol. 17 ABSTRACT Purpose/problem statement – The two most successful complex adaptive systems are the Market and Science, each with an inherent tendency toward epistemic imperialism. Of late, science, notably medical science, seems to have…

Cognitive Opening and Closing: Toward an Exploration of the Mental World of Entrepreneurship

Here is Thierry Aimar’s intro to his paper for Hayek in Mind. Contemporary analysis usually divides games of chance into three dimensions. In Machina and Schmeidler’s (1992) terms, this division can be viewed based on the example of an urn containing 90 balls of different colors, out of which an agent pulls a ball, of…

Hayek’s Post-Positivist Empiricism: Experience Beyond Sensation

The intro from Jan Willem Lindemans’ paper: The philosophical foundations of Hayek’s works are not beyond dispute (Gray, 1984, Kukathas, 1989, Caldwell, 1992, Hutchison, 1992): was Hayek a rationalist or an empiricist; did he follow Kant or Hume, Mises or Popper? Difficulties arise because these questions touch upon social theory, political philosophy, methodology and epistemology.…

Beyond Complexity: Can The Sensory Order Defend the Liberal Self?

My chum Chor-yung Cheung who like myself is both an Oakeshottian and a Hayekian introduces his paper below: Friedrich Hayek’s social philosophy is one of the most systematic and sophisticated among the contributions made by 20th-century liberal thinkers. His defense of the free market and individual freedom and his critique of collectivism of various kinds are…

Rationalism in Politics

In anticipation of a talk I’m giving later on in the week on Oakeshott’s so-called “dispositional conservatism”, here is a nice little piece by my chum Gene Callahan serving as a good introduction to RIP. The British philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott is a curious figure in twentieth-century intellectual history. He is known mostly as…

The Emergence of the Mind: Hayek’s Account of Mental Phenomena as a Product of Spontaneous Physical and Social Orders

Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo’s intro from her excellent paper. Friedrich Hayek’s social theory is well known for his articulation of the paradigm of spontaneous orders that challenges the traditional distinction between what is natural and what is artificial. The problem that Hayek saw is that language and other social objects do not fall under either…

Hayek’s Self-organizing Mental Order and Folk-Psychological Theories of the Mind

Here is the Introduction to Chiara Chelini’s paper, the full version available here. Humans are social creatures and they deeply rely on mentalizing, which aims at understanding other people behaviours and formulating expectations about their future actions. The existence of inner mental states has been postulated in order to give an explanatory account of the…

Fuster’s “Prólogo” to Hayek’s El Orden Sensorial

Here is a translation I commissioned by José Villavicencio of Joaquin Fuster’s “Prólogo” to F. Hayek El Orden Sensorial. Unión Editorial, S.A., Madrid, pp 11-23, 2004. +++++++++++++++++++ Prologue Salzburg, May 17, 1976 Dear Professor Fuster, Thank you very much for your kind letter dated the 3rd of this month and that I have in my possession without…