Praxeology

This lecture by David Gordon was presented at the 2012 Mises University in Auburn, Alabama.  Includes an introduction my Mark Thornton.

hy is logic, usually thought of as a branch of philosophy, important to Austrian scholars, most of whom are economists and not philosophers? The aim of this paper is to sketch a number of reasons and draw some conclusions. 

A sizable number of examiners of Austrian economics have come to hold a mistaken view that Hoppe’s and Rothbard’s stances on the nature and status of the action axiom are fundamentally incompatible.

The praxeological method is an efficacious way to investigate the fundamental theoretical questions at the heart of any study of human endeavor. 

The author believes the evidence presented in this paper raises serious questions for Kirzner’s interpretation of Robbins’s Essay. Mises certainly treated Robbins’s book 

Our hope in publishing this symposium is to assist other instructors in teaching Austrian macroeconomics at the intermediate level and to inspire those who are inclined and equipped to contribute publications 

Sociologists seek a profundity and seriousness in their work that belies the constraints entailed in any consistent theoretical perspective. Switching implicitly, and perhaps unconsciously, from one paradigm to another provides an illusion of scope

This article deals with the epistemological bases for the axiom of action and more particularly with man’s capacity to have an a priori knowledge.

Confronted with the limitations of formalism, many economists have adopted alternative epistemological approaches which are supposed to favor a better understanding of economic phenomena. Among those, hermeneutics has enjoyed a certain success. Hermeneutics is a general theory of understanding based on the interpretation of an external reality testifying to an internal subjective reality. In economics, the interpretive act (or the process of theorization) consists in the ongoing dialogic confrontation between what contemporary economists know and what the individuals under scrutiny express of their own interpretation of the world.