Navigation

Tag Archives | Praxeology

Rand Unbound, Part 6

By on February 2, 2010 1

I’m back from San Diego, and the Randstravaganza over at Cato Unbound has been continuing apace. (I contributed a few posts from the road, and some more since my return.) So here’s the latest (I’ve altered the order slightly to reflect what people seemed to be replying to rather than when the replies went up):

Ayn RandDoug
Mike
Neera
Me
Mike
Doug
Neera
Doug
Me
Neera
Doug
Mike
Doug
Will
Mike
Me
Doug
Me
Mike

I’ve just sent in a response to Mike’s latest, which will go up either today or tomorrow. The discussion will wrap up tomorrow.

Belated Austro-Athenian Plug

By on January 5, 2010 11

This news is nearly a year old now, but Geoff Plauché’s excellent dissertation is online. It combines Aristotelean eudaimonism, Austrian praxeology, dialectical libertarianism, Ayn Rand, New Left anti-corporatism, and free-market anarchism. (So, nothing that would interest any readers of this blog ….)

Prax Vobiscum

By on January 2, 2010 4
Tom Woods

Tom Woods

Tom Woods has an excellent piece on LRC today criticising Catholic social theorists who think they can derive policy proposals from papal pronouncements without having to know any economics.

Of course I think Tom’s case against extending papal authority to economic facts is an equally good argument against accepting it for the moral and theological facts that are supposed to be its proper ambit, since these facts too “cannot be protested, defied, or lectured to” but “can only be learned and acted upon.” But since he so nicely cites my abstraction paper I won’t press the point.

The Check Is Not In the Mail

By on December 18, 2009 6

writing a check

According to this story (CHT LRC), the first check (or cheque) in England was written in 1659.

Clearly this is false. Nobody would have accepted the first check; indeed, nothing even counts as “writing a check” except against the background of an established practice of check-writing.

Hence there could never have been a first check. And that leaves us only two options.

Either the practice of check-writing must stretch back to infinity – which in turn means that the creationists and the evolutionists are both wrong, and Aristotle is right: the universe and the human race are infinitely old, and we’ve been writing checks forever – or else there has never yet been a check, and all experience to the contrary is an illusion.

JLS  Symposium on Atlas Shrugged  Finally Available

By on November 27, 2009 16
Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

The last issue of Journal of Libertarian Studies – last as in most recent (it remains to be seen whether it’s the last absolutely, as there might be at least one more issue) – was devoted inter alia to a symposium on the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, with new contributions by Barbara Branden, Geoff Plauché, and Jennifer Baker, and two previously unpublished pieces by Murray Rothbard – one an amazingly revealing fan letter to Rand, and one a defense of Rand’s aesthetic theory. (The rest of the issue is interesting too, including a dandy piece by Bob Higgs on anarchism. For further details, see the summaries here and here.)

I’m particularly proud of that issue – but until recently, it wasn’t available online yet. Now it is. Gaudete igitur.

It looks to me as though hard copies of that issue (21.4) are available for sale also, but I haven’t tested whether that’s true.

Powered by WordPress. Designed by WooThemes