Writing a textbook on philosophy of economics presents some hard challenges. Neither philosophy nor economics is sufficiently defined and circumscribed to make an overview easy. The nature of philosophy is currently quite contested. The naturalism movement exemplified by Quine now competes with a very traditional, conceptual-analysis trend that gives limited place to science (and thus by implic...

The ecological crisis goes a long way back and has been brewing for centuries. main factors of human alienation from nature: technical progress; suppression pagan culture, that used to be tied nature, world religions; spread atheism; consolidation the positivism paradigm in scientific methodology; triumph market economy model. As result, humans were pulled out their natural environment. They li...

After a general philosophical introduction, this chapter discusses the meaning and nature of a “pure” science of economics, both as an analytical and a classificatory conception. This discussion leads to the nature of abstraction, idealization, ideal objects, and the production of abstract mathematical theories in economics, which gives rise to Walras’ problem, namely that of “returning to real...

1 The Oxford handbook of philosophy of economics aims at bringing out what is new in the philosophy of economics—an aim that, I believe, has been successfully achieved. The introductory chapter by Don Ross and Harold Kincaid does a superb job of describing the current orientation of philosophy of economics, the result of developments in philosophy of science, in economics, and in the relationsh...