The Philosophy of Economics

Part I. Classic Discussions

1. On the definition and method of political economy John Stuart Mill

2. Objectivity and understanding in economics Max Weber

3. The nature and significance of economic science Lionel Robbins

4. Economics and human action Frank Knight

5. Philosophical foundations of economics: three texts Karl Marx

6. The limitations of marginal utility Thorstein Veblen
Part II. Positivist and Popperian Views

7. The methodology of positive economics Milton Friedman

8. Testability and approximation Herbert Simon

9. Why look under the hood? Daniel M. Hausman

10. Popper and Lakatos in economic methodology D. Wade Hands
Part III. Ideology and Normative Economics

11. Science and ideology Joseph Schumpeter

12. Welfare propositions of economics and interpersonal comparisons of utility Nicholas Kaldor

13. The philosophical foundations of mainstream normative economics Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson

14. Why is cost-benefit analysis so controversial? Robert Frank

15. Capability and well-being Amartya Sen
Part IV. Branches and Schools of Economics and Their Methodological Problems

16. Econometrics as observation: the Lucas critique and the nature of econometric inference Kevin Hoover

17. Does macroeconomics need microfoundations? Kevin Hoover

18. Economics in the laboratory Vernon Smith

19. Neuroeconomics: using neuroscience to make economic predictions Colin F. Camerer

20. The market as a creative process James M. Buchanan and Viktor J. Vanberg

21. What is the essence of institutional economics? Geoffrey Hodgson; Part V. New Directions in Economic Methodology

22. The rhetoric of this economics Deirdre McCloskey
23. Realism Uskali Mäki

24. What has realism got to do with it? Tony Lawson

25. Feminism and economics Julie Nelson

Hausman, Daniel M.
Daniel M. Hausman is Herbert A. Simon Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He previously taught at the University of Maryland at College Park and Carnegie Mellon University. Most of his research has focused on methodological, metaphysical, and ethical issues at the boundaries between economics and philosophy, and in collaboration with Michael McPherson, he founded the Cambridge University Press journal Economics and Philosophy and edited it for its first ten years. His most important books include The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (1992), Economic Analysis and Moral Philosophy (co-authored with Michael McPherson, 1996), Causal Asymmetries (1998) and Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy (an enlarged second edition of the 1996 book co-authored with Michael McPherson, 2006).