Journal of Philosophical Economics最新文献

{"title":"Some thoughts on ancient civilizations' trinity of philosophy, religion and economics","authors":"Soumitra Sharma","doi":"10.46298/jpe.10707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10707","url":null,"abstract":"Here are some loud thoughts that reflect upon the relationship that had long existed amidst philosophy, religion and economics in the so-called ‘grand’ civilizations (that had existed during 3100 BC to the beginning of Christian era). Historically, the visions of intellectuals, rulers, men of faiths, and business people have helped drive these civilizations to their zenith. The philosophies, religions, and economics of the time were deeply involved in this process of development, and seem to have acted in unison. Here is an attempt to provoke some fresh thinking on the subject by re-examining this triad relationship of the fundamental spheres of human life. The logic of this paper attempts to raise doubts, if the relationship was ideal and was based on ethical and moral values, as it was proclaimed by the philosophers, pontiffs, politicians and the business leaders of the time.","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42400031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Smith's invisible hand: controversy is needed","authors":"F. D. Mario, A. Micocci","doi":"10.46298/jpe.10706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10706","url":null,"abstract":"Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand, commonly attributed to The Wealth of Nations, is described in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is a ‘deception’ fed to the lower classes. Private initiative depends upon the presence of privileged classes in a conservative rather than liberal state. Only thus can the ‘invisible hand’ improve the nation's ‘wealth.’ Hence, the economic mainstream cannot easily claim Adam Smith as their ancestor. Nor can the Marxists associate him to the misdeeds of the mainstream. A Smithian ancestry is more plausible for Neoliberals.","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70491441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How to transform economics? A philosophical appraisal","authors":"Deniz Kellecioglu","doi":"10.46298/jpe.10704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10704","url":null,"abstract":"Ten years after the global financial crisis there is hardly any evidence that the theories, teaching and policies of mainstream economics have changed. This paper is an attempt to contribute to the greater understanding of this persistence, but also to the discussion on what the requirements are to materialise a transformation in economics, given the dismal outcomes in the world economy. The analytical approach of the paper is to utilise relevant philosophical accounts that point out attributes of dominant discourses, and methodological requirements to supersede an already dominant discourse. The objective is to contribute to an improved understanding of factors that obstruct or construct transformations in a knowledge field such as economics; and thereby contribute to transformation efforts, preferably for a more pluralist and emancipatory economics. Given the complexities and the tensions between different philosophical positions, the conclusions of this appraisal are summarised into five criteria that appear essential to realise a successful transformation in economics: critical juncture; dissimilarity; scholar validation; sensibility; and external power. It is suggested to revise efforts to fulfil these criteria as much, and as soon as possible, given the importance and urgency of changing the trajectory of our economies and societies.","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43934993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Economics, chrematistics, oikos and polis in Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas","authors":"José Luis Cendejas Bueno","doi":"10.46298/jpe.10699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10699","url":null,"abstract":"In Aristotle’s thought, economic activity refers to a kind of praxis consisting in allocating the human and material means that constitute the oikos –the domestic community- to fulfil its natural ends: ensure both life and the means of life. By means of natural chrematistics -acquisitive art- families acquire the necessary means for this, which come from production and exchange. Families group together in the political community (polis) whose end is living well, according to virtues, among which justice is highlighted as the ‘complete virtue’. For its part, the Christian êthos regards every human act, internal and external, of this complete system (polis, oikos and chrematistics) as tending towards its ultimate purpose (beatitudo). In St. Thomas’s view, eternal law harmonizes necessity of irrational beings, loving God’s action (divine law), natural law, and the contingency of ‘human things’ where the economy is included. Trading activity is lawful if it is at the service of the oikos or polis and according to how is exercised, by following commutative justice. The family, political and religious character of human nature establishes what the natural-necessary consists of, embracing, apart from bodily goods, others derived from considering social status and the life chosen (civil, religious, active or contemplative). Economic activity based on this anthropological root has a specific place as a part of an ordered natural-legal totality that provides the economy with meaning and sufficient moral guidance.","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44776700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"'Growth in a Time of Debt' as an example of the logical-positivist science","authors":"Mariusz Maziarz","doi":"10.46298/jpe.10700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10700","url":null,"abstract":"The paper addresses the question whether the now- infamous piece of econometric research conducted by Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) that set the threshold hypothesis in the relation between public debt and economic growth was conducted in accordance with the neopositivist doctrine. The article consists of two parts. First, the epistemic advice given by logical positivism is reconstructed and operationalized. Second, the cliometric method employed by Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) is analyzed. The answer to the research question is affirmative. ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’ is a piece of logical-positivist science because (1) the research is data-based and aimed at confirming the results, (2) its authors are committed to the neopositivist theory-observation distinction, (3) its goal is describing an empirical generalization and the result’s interpretations suggest that (4) Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) understand causality in a reductionist way, as a constant conjunction.","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46105889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Review of Ajit Sinha, A Revolution in Economic Theory: The Economics of Piero Sraffa, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, x + 244 pages, ISBN 978-3319306155","authors":"Romar Correa","doi":"10.46298/jpe.10703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10703","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Ajit Sinha, A Revolution in Economic Theory: The Economics of Piero Sraff a, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, x + 244 pages, ISBN 978-3319306155Piero Sraffa's 1960 subversive classic was the leanest, most muscular missive ever to strike at the heart of economics orthodoxy. Short of a hundred pages, every word of the book was chosen with care. The math was transparent and constructive. More than once throughout his review of this slim volume, Ajit Sinha refers to its aesthetics as a representation of 'minimalist art'. Since Sinha has long and assiduously, over publication in leading journals, crafted an interpretation of Sraffa's evolution in the book under review, the aesthetics of this independent scholar also merit attention. Careful with exegesis, Professor Sinha has collaborated with imaginative mathematicians to push the Sraffa agenda decidedly forward (Cockshott & Sinha, 2008; Sinha & Dupertuis 2009A, 2009B).The walls of the Gokhale Institute of Politics & Economics in Pune, India, were once adorned with the prints of Joan Miro to reflect sensibilities of the then Director, Ajit Sinha. These prints display everyday objects like a cork, a feather and a hatpin. They are not multidimensional and must be chosen. Arranged in a particular manner, they become works of art (Combalia, 2008). Miro sought the 'assassination of painting', a revolt against the mainstream of the day (Rowell, 1987, pp. 114-116). However, he never became a member of either of the opposing camps. Thus, his work was surreal but he was unlike the surrealists of his time.The Sinha-Sraffa intellectual reconstruction not only starts with an empirical economy but also, as we will see, ends with the empirical economy as a system of production as a whole. The components of the structure are statistical givens in the sense of a system of National Accounts, but the sectors must be chosen and arranged to represent an economy cast in circular terms. To raise a point about metrics of an economic system below, we observe that the economy will be rich in variety, with many technological coefficients, differing profit rates across sectors, and so on. This ground-breaking first step demonstrates the ambition of the enterprise. No other research programme in either mainstream or radical political economy originates in an empirical economy. General Equilibrium theory (GE), for instance, follows the Bourbaki practice of axiom-theoremproof. On this score, Sinha rues the went on with the exultation of the Cantabrians over their foes from Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 'capital controversy'. The focus was the meaning of capital in the production function and the aggregation problem. But once a complete GE model was specified, the neoclassical / non neoclassical divide could be glossed over, and the marginal (no pun intended!) slip could be conceded. GE theorists went on with the the job of relaxing axioms, solving conundrums, and proving new theorems. The research programme of the Sraffians, ","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46120409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The dominion of means over ends. Modern bank credit and Max Weber's irrational rationalization","authors":"D. Cortese","doi":"10.20472/IAC.2017.029.009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20472/IAC.2017.029.009","url":null,"abstract":"The institutions which grant credit today can be considered to be an example of what Max Weber describes as the typical rationalization of modern age. Such a rationalization would bring a lack of reflection on what should be the ultimate significance of certain technical means, which are confused with a value-in-itself of a social context. The paper highlight the fact that the function of credit consistent with individuals’ ‘ultimate ends’ seems to be that of a temporal coordination between the ‘bargaining wills’ of different individuals who aim at obtaining the highest benefit by means of the utility of their products and the products of their peers. But the current epoch has favored the elevation of historically determined features of credit-issuing to ultimate ends. Referring, among other sources, to a report by the Bank of England and to studies by Neo-Keynesian authors such as Stiglitz, this essay establishes that the consequence of the current private structure of credit-issuing is that the ultimate end of credit does not coincide with maximization and economic reciprocity but with the assessment of a risk which is distinctly private. Also, since in this structure Central Bank acts as the bank of all commercial banks, credit granting can be read as being in function of the availability – within a circumscribed economic web – of a specific credit ‘raw material’ which has a price: central bank’s liquidity. This situation puts a deep philosophical problem into the limelight, since any ‘existential’ preferability of the current model of credit issuing can only be explained as an alienation.","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45440304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Economic theory in historical perspective","authors":"Lefteris Tsoulfidis","doi":"10.1007/978-3-540-92693-1_17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92693-1_17","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/978-3-540-92693-1_17","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46564330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Planning horizons as an ordinal entropic measure of organization","authors":"Frederic Jennings Jr.","doi":"10.46298/jpe.10695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10695","url":null,"abstract":"Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) educated economists on the notion of entropy laws in economics and ecological process. An earlier paper by Kenneth E. Boulding (1962) asked what we might do with a measure of organizational entropy, were one ever devised. The aim of this paper is to propose the notion of planning horizons as a candidate for this role. First, the concept of organizational entropy is discussed and defined within the interdependent domain of ecological economics. Next, the character and contributions of an entropic measure of organization are reviewed, as described in Boulding’s work. Third, the concept of planning horizons – and their relation to economic cohesion, efficiency and well-being – is introduced to show how ‘horizon effects’ (shifts in planning horizons) serve as an ordinal entropic measure of organization in dynamic complex settings of interdependent effects. Last, the promise of planning horizons as a new social research program in ecological economics shall be discussed.","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70491599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aristotle on justice in exchange: commensurability by fiat","authors":"M. Peacock","doi":"10.46298/jpe.10693","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10693","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers an interpretation of Aristotle's remarks on the commensurability of goods in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics. It explores the term ‘by hypothesis’ (ἐξ ὑποθέσεως) which Aristotle uses to describe the institution of currency through which commensurability is established. The term implies that Aristotle conceives the origins of currency to lie in a conscious act of stipulation rather than through a spontaneous process in which currency is established via the unintended consequences of individual action. In conclusion, contemporary theories of money are considered and it is asked with which Aristotle’s conception of money aligns most closely.","PeriodicalId":41686,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophical Economics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70491434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}