In its own contemporary context, Kant’s views on the relationship between reason and religion played a crucial role in debates about the nature of the Enlightenment. The terms of that debate, as they were most sharply formulated by F. H. Jacobi, posed an either/or choice of reason or faith, between which Kant offered a third option that would synthesize reason and faith. A newly published collection of essays, Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, not only echoes this debate in current terms (...) but also suggests that the unfinished business of the Enlightenment in regard to morality, religion, and the historicity of reason is still with us. (shrink)

These suggestions for the betterment and elucidation of the text of the De Beneficiis are additional to those already published in the Classical Quarterly in January, 1934. They are based on a conviction much deepened since that time that Buck1 is right when he says: N allein, und zwar ohne seine Ueberarbeitungen von späteren Händen, darf die Grundlage des Textes von de beneficiis bilden. Préchac3, the latest critical editor in this field, substantially confirms Buck's sweeping conclusion by an independent survey (...) of the evidence. The readings designated in the Teubner text3 as N2 and N3 are themselves conjectures, not readings drawn from independent sources of testimony, and as conjectures they must be judged. Gertz4 had long before discerned the truth even if he seemed somewhat cavalier in his attitude toward other manuscripts than N. (shrink)

The article is devoted to social problems of modern science (as it were interpreted Max Weber) considered in the context of the system-communicative approach by N. Luhmann. In contrast to the modern work of art, the modern science, as M. Weber believes, is associated with the fundamental unattainability of “true being”, and, as a result, with the transitory character of any scientific achievement. The specialty of modern science, as Weber noted, is determinated, on the one hand by its self-understanding, due (...) to the “peculiarity of the current moment”, and, on the other, by its transformation into a kind of blind spot of scientific observation. As a result, Weber formulated the main problem of the meaning of modern science: he wondered why any scientist needs a science under (1) external alienation and (2) inaccessibility of a scientific object? Moreover, the category of truth not just acquires its special value, but also sets a special meaning to the purpose of scientific communication, that becomes an object but not a property of scientific search. The main content of the article is the study of the Weberian concepts of the external (science as a profession) and internal (science as vocation) social factors of modern science as they were interpreted by E. von Kahler, G. Rickert, M. Scheller, K. Loewit. The authors discuss their attempts to modernize the fundamental Weberian distinction of truth/value as a principle of inclusion in the scientific community, that was formulated as a response to the “Weber’s challenge”. The authors argue that von Kahler criticized the Weberian concept for the incompatibility of the spatial and temporal discreteness of science within the “organic understanding” of the unity of the world. At the same time Scheler and Rickert payed special attention to the problem of subject specification of science. K. Levit discussed the possibility of Weber’s substitution of objectivity as a key distinction of modern knowledge with some opposite attribute. In the final part, the authors summarize the inconsistency of predictions about the further internal differentiation of scientific disciplines and the rejection of research motive for “genuine being”. (shrink)

Landscape took on a new meaning through the new science of plant geography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1857). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “landscape” was foremost a painterly genre. Slowly, painted landscapes came to bear on natural surroundings, but by 1800 it was still not common to designate sites as “landscapes.” Humboldt looked at plant vegetation with a painterly gaze. Artists, according to him, could suggest in their work that an abstract unity lay hidden underneath observable (...) phenomena. Humboldt projected painted landscapes on nature and found its ecological unity. By doing so, he ultimately stripped the concept of landscape from its primary visual meaning. (shrink)

Humboldtian science Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9480-6 Authors David Oldroyd, School of History and Philosophy, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052 Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

The continuous substantial and flexible material support of the bankers Joseph and Alexander Mendelssohn were of essential importance for Alexander von Humboldt's outstanding scientific expeditions and his work as a publicist, coordinator and supporter of fellow scientist and scientific projects in Berlin for decades. New sources present this support of Humboldt by the Mendelssohns in all its depth and variety. At the same time, the enduring funding of one of Prussia's most important Bildungsbürger clearly illustrates that (...) the business policy of the Mendelssohn bankers was based on a canon of values in which the acceptance of responsibility in different fields of society were of equal importance as pure economic success. (shrink)

The cognizability of the world according to Alexander von Humboldt: the experience of landscape. According to Alexander von Humboldt, geography ought to aim to go beyond the modern attitude of seeing knowledge as being the result of a spatial and temporal abstraction from the real world. Von Humboldt wishes to create a new theory of knowledge, one that instead of just simplifying, schematizing, and categorizing reality is able to highlight its multiple meanings, its diversity of (...) perspectives, and its hermeneutical keys. Von Humboldt’s project strives to achieve a universal cognition of the world (or a universal geography) by claiming the centrality of the experience of landscape. This is evidence for von Humboldt’s far-sightedness, since he anticipated the present day trend of considering landscape as a corner stone of interdisciplinary enquiries into the meaning of the world. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the concept of pilgrimage provides a unifying trope for the otherwise seemingly unfocused travel accounts of Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior and Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland’s Voyage aux régions equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent. I begin with a brief description of debates regarding the notion of pilgrimage. After that I show how pilgrimage as trope may be applied to the texts of these authors. This is followed by an application of (...) the classical stages of pilgrimage to particular phases of Bashō’s and Humboldt’s recounted experiences. I conclude that pilgrimage offers an illuminating new way to understand the travel accounts of these two writers. (shrink)

RESUMEN Es recurrente la tendencia a considerar a Alexander von Humboldt como autor romántico-naturalista, dada la combinación del método científico de análisis empírico de la naturaleza con su visión estético-subjetiva que posee ciertos rasgos "románticos". Un estudio del léxico empleado por Humboldt en las descripciones de la naturaleza revela, sin embargo, el predominio del lenguaje estrictamente científico e intersubjetivo sobre el subjetivo. La presencia de rasgos semánticos "románticos" no es, empero, meramente ornamental, sino que cumple una función (...) estética que, en la percepción humboldtiana de la naturaleza, es un complemento subjetivo indispensable dentro de su imagen holística del mundo. ABSTRACT Alexander von Humboldt tends to be considered a romantic-naturalist author, due to the way he combines the scientific method of empirical analysis of nature with his aesthetic-subjective view that could be said to have some "romantic" characteristics. Nonetheless, the study of the lexicon used by Humboldt to describe nature reveals the predominance of strictly scientific and intersubjective language over subjective language. Even so, the presence of "romantic" semantic traits is not merely ornamental; rather, it has an aesthetic function, which, in Humboldt's perception of nature, is an indispensible subjective complement within his holistic worldview. (shrink)

This article is a meditation on the overlaps between environmentalism, post-colonial theory, and the practice of history. It takes as a case study the writings of the explorer-scientist-abolitionist Alexander von Humboldt , the founder of a humane, socially conscious ecology. The post-colonial critique has provided a necessary corrective to the global environmental movement, by focusing it on enduring colonialist power dynamics, but at the same time it has crippled the field of environmental history, by dooming us to a (...) model of the past in which all Euro-American elites, devoid of personal agency, are always already in an exploitative relationship with the people and natural resources of the developing world. A close reading of Humboldt’s work, however, suggests that it could provide the basis for a healthy post-colonial environmentalism, if only post-colonial critics were willing to see beyond Humboldt’s complicity in colonial structures. In particular, this article attempts to rehabilitate Humboldt’s reputation in the face of Mary Louise Pratt’s canonical post-colonial study, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Humboldt’s efforts to inspire communion with Nature while simultaneously recognizing Nature’s “otherness” can be seen as radical both in his day and in ours. In addition his analysis of the link between the exploitation of natural resources and the exploitation of certain social groups anticipates the global environmental justice movement. (shrink)

Critic, poet and philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) was a leading figure of German Romanticism. In the two years before his untimely death, he wrote three cycles of lectures intended as part of a larger project to lay the foundations of a new general philosophy. Two of these cycles, 'Philosophie des Lebens' (given in 1827, published 1828) and 'Philosophie des Sprache und des Wortes' (given in December 1828 and published posthumously), are reissued here in an 1847 English translation. The first (...) presents Schlegel's understanding of philosophy as independent of theology or politics, concerned with the 'inner spiritual life' of humankind. The second explores the nature of communication through language and art. Schlegel argues that full human consciousness cannot be restored by Enlightenment science, but only by divine revelation and redemption. He offers no ready-made solutions, but encourages his listeners to develop their own responses to these questions. (shrink)

SummaryThe discovery of dark lines in the spectrum of the sun as well as in some fixed stars since 1802 by William Hyde Wollaston, Joseph Fraunhofer and Johann Lamont is a relatively isolated phenomenon in the history of astronomy of the first half of the 19th century. Wollaston's representation of the sun's spectrum of 1802 can be seen as a simplification and reduction of the phenomenon by way of a seemingly clear connection with contemporary knowledge. Fraunhofer's famous colour etching of (...) the dark lines, of about 1817, can be regarded as a meticulous and painstaking representation of the known facts, taken to a high aesthetic level.Lamont's spectra of the fixed stars from 1836 are the first sketches of all of these phenomena. He emphasized the ‘oddness’, that is, the chaotic variety of identifiable lines. What was common to all of these representations was the general belief that something new and unimaginable could now be established as a scientific subject. The observations of these lines were coincidental with the thinking in other fields, as for example, in Alexander Humboldt's understanding of nature, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's theory of light and his interest in pictorial representations of nature, and in the new concept of landscape of the romantic painters. (shrink)

This study explored LaRose and Eastin's model of media attendance, within a European context. It extended the uses and gratifications paradigm within the framework of social cognitive theory by instituting new operational measures of gratifications sought, reconstructed as outcome expectations. Although the model of media attendance offers some promising steps forward in measuring media selectivity and usage, and to some extent is applicable to another context of media use, the relative importance of outcome expectancies in explaining media usage and selectivity (...) is not fully supported. (shrink)

Precarious Matters. The Radium Economy, Episteme of Risk and the Emergence of Tracer Technique in National SocialismFollowing the traces of radioactive material is – as scholars have recently shown – a valuable historical approach in order to evaluate the material ’factor’ of science in action. Even though the origins of materials like radium and artificial isotopes are quite different, their circulation is interconnected. A material pathway can be drawn from the radium industry to the scientific rise of artificial isotopes as (...) indicator substances in the 1930s, continuing to the building of networks by German scientists working for the war efforts. Also, this pathway reveals the role of radiation protection in establishing that material culture. Finally, the dynamics of material traces and institutional linkages is shown by the tracer work of biophysicists and radiation biologists working at the Genetic Department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin and at the Institut de Chimie Nucléaire at Paris, which at that time was occupied by German troops. (shrink)

The article introduces the pedagogical background and impact of Grue-Sørensen. Knud Grue-Sørensen came to educational science from philosophy and was infl uenced by Kantian philosopher Leonard Nelson. Grue-Sørensen became the first professor of education at the University of Copenhagen. During an era in which research in the fi eld of education became more and more infl uenced by empirical research, Grue- Sørensen held on to a theoretically and historically rooted pedagogy. Among other works he authored a threevolume account of the (...) history of education and the encyclopaedia “Almen Pædagogik”. (shrink)

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) – either as “standard” GIS or custom made Historical GIS (HGIS) – have become quite popular in some historical sub-disciplines, such as Economic and Social History or Historical Geography. “Mainstream” history, however, seems to be rather unaffected by this trend. More generally speaking: Why is it that computer applications in general have failed to make much headway in history departments, despite the first steps being undertaken a good forty years ago? With the “spatial turn” in full (...) swing in the humanities, and many historians dealing with spatial and geographical questions, one would think GIS would be welcomed with open arms. Yet there seems to be no general anticipation by historians of employing GIS as a research tool. As mentioned, HGIS are popular chiefly among Historical Geographers and Social and Economic Historians. The latter disciplines seem to be predestined to use such software through the widespread quantitative methodology these disciplines have employed traditionally. Other historical sub-disciplines, such as Ancient History, are also very open to this emerging technology since the scarcity of written sources in this field can be mitigated by inferences made from an HGIS that has archaeological data stored in it, for example. In most of Modern History, however, the use of GIS is rarely seen. The intellectual benefit that a GIS may bring about seems not be apparent to scholars from this sub-discipline (and others). This book wants to investigate and discuss this controversy. Why does the wider historian community not embrace GIS more readily? While one cannot deny that the methodologies linked with a GIS follow geographical paradigms rather than historical ones, the potential of GIS as a 'killer application' for digital historical scholarship should be obvious. This book brings together authors from Geography and History to discuss the value of GIS for historical research. The focus, however, will not be on the "how", but on the "why" of GIS in history. (shrink)

This contribution draws attention to the circulation of materialities and persons as a central feature in the constitution of experimental cultures. The protein and ribosome research at the Max Planck Society (MPG)—with a main focus on the research conducted by Brigitte Wittmann‐Liebold at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics—serves as an example to highlight some of the central conditions that determined the material circulation in molecular biology: the very organizational framework of gender and economics. In doing so, this contribution (...) argues for a historical narrative that stresses the conditions facilitating the circulation of technologies, materials, and personnel. Histories of this kind contribute to an integrated view of the scientific, technological, social, political, economic, and cultural specificities of experimental cultures. (shrink)

In its own contemporary context, Kant’s views on the relationship between reason and religion played a crucial role in debates about the nature of the Enlightenment. The terms of that debate, as they were most sharply formulated by F. H. Jacobi, posed an either/or choice of reason or faith, between which Kant offered a third option that would synthesize reason and faith. A newly published collection of essays, Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, not only echoes this debate in current terms (...) but also suggests that the unfinished business of the Enlightenment in regard to morality, religion, and the historicity of reason is still with us. (shrink)

Scheler's philosophic reflections on religious experience and on the connections between this experience and those reflections seek to found a phenomenological personalism. Hence I first delineate his conception of person via his view of phenomenology as resulting from a critique of husserl. I then elaborate scheler's conception of philosophy in terms of the intentional acts involved. After a similar elaboration of scheler's view of religion, I present his 'system of conformity' of the proper interplay of philosophy and religion. I conclude (...) by indicating why his phenomenological anthropology is not only inadequate to the foundational task assigned to it but methodologically incoherent. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper brings together the history of risk and the history of DNA repair, a biological phenomenon that emerged as a research field in between molecular biology, genetics, and radiation research in the 1960s. The case of xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), an inherited hypersensitivity to UV light and, hence, a disposition to skin cancer will be the starting point to argue that, in the 1970s and 1980s, DNA repair became entangled in the creation of new models of the human body at (...) risk – what is here conceptually referred to as the vulnerability aspect of body history – and new attempts at cancer prevention and enhancement of the body associated with the new flourishing research areas of antimutagenesis and anticarcinogenesis. The aim will be to demonstrate that DNA repair created special attempts at disease prevention: molecular enhancement, seeking to identify means to increase the self-repair abilities of the body at the molecular level. Prevention in this sense meant enhancing the body's ability to cope with the environmental hazards of an already toxic world. This strategy has recently been adopted by the beauty industry, which introduced DNA care as a new target for skin care research and anti-aging formulas. (shrink)

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...) as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum. (shrink)

PurposeChildhood onset speech fluency disorder is possibly related to dopaminergic dysfunction. Mesencephalic hyperechogenicity detected by transcranial ultrasound might be seen as an indirect marker of dopaminergic dysfunction. We here determined whether adults who stutter since childhood show ME.MethodsWe performed TCS in ten AWS and ten matched adults who never stuttered. We also assessed motor performance in finger tapping and in the 25 Foot Walking test.ResultsCompared to controls, AWS showed enlarged ME on either side. Finger tapping was slower in AWS. Walking (...) cadence, i.e., the ratio of number of steps by time, tended to be higher in AWS than in control participants.DiscussionThe results demonstrate a motor deficit in AWS linked to dopaminergic dysfunction and extending beyond speech. Since iron deposits evolve in childhood and shrink thereafter, ME might serve as an easily quantifiable biomarker helping to predict the risk of persistency in children who stutter. (shrink)

The Stiftung Ökologischer Landbau (SÖL), founded in the mid-1970s, set out to promote organic farming in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). To this end, it brought together protagonists from the scientific community and the environmental movement to build a knowledge base for organic agriculture by drawing on the science-based concepts of natural and organic farming of the 1920s and 1930s. Based on the history of its founding, its structure, and work, this article demonstrates that temporality played an essential role (...) in the establishment of alternative bodies of knowledge. Contrary to the established model of linear scientific-technological progress, the aim was to return to bodies of knowledge and practices that had largely disappeared from the scientific canon of knowledge, but also from agricultural practice, in previous processes of forgetting and marginalization. This is exemplified by the so-called “spade diagnosis,” a method developed in the 1930s by soil biologists to assess arable soil. Concepts and practice of counter-knowledge amounted to a model of conservative modernization in organic farming. (shrink)

This paper works with the modern concept of the geological hotspot track – the building processes and movements of volcanic island chains – applied strategically to one of its illustrative formations, the Madeira Archipelago. By analogy, however, the concept works equally well to describe the important early 19th-century scientific knowledge-building activity that produced Charles Lyell's On the Geology of Some Parts of Madeira (1854). A central section of the paper uncovers the contributions to knowledge of this geology before Lyell's, and (...) in particular, Excursions of Madeira and Porto Santo (1825) by Mr [sic] T. Edward Bowdich. A thorough examination of this text then constitutes an important case study for literal and figurative investigation of geological hotspot tracks. The main argument proposed is that current specialist research forgets its submerged and longer histories to its detriment. Insights contained in older information often supply reminders of the key questions and contributions from the past that provide checks and balances for further developments of a field. By promoting multi-level, multi-stranded and multi-lingual investigation of the history of 19th-century geology in Madeira before Lyell (1854) as central to hotspot track research, this paper marks nodal conditions that constitute advancement in critical knowledge-building within and outside the discipline of geology. (shrink)

Wilhelm von Humboldt's classic study of human language was first published in 1836, as a general introduction to his three-volume treatise on the Kawi language of Java. It is the final statement of his lifelong study of the nature of language, exploring its universal structures and its relation to mind and culture. Empirically wide-ranging - Humboldt goes far beyond the Indo-European family of languages - it remains one of the most interesting and important attempts to draw philosophical conclusions (...) from comparative linguistics. This volume presents a translation by Peter Heath, together with an introduction by Michael Losonsky that places Humboldt's work in its historical context and discusses its relevance to contemporary work in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology. (shrink)

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and education, as (...) well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)

With any structural inference rule A/B, we associate the rule $${(A \lor p)/(B \lor p)}$$, providing that formulas A and B do not contain the variable p. We call the latter rule a join-extension ( $${\lor}$$ -extension, for short) of the former. Obviously, for any intermediate logic with disjunction property, a $${\lor}$$ -extension of any admissible rule is also admissible in this logic. We investigate intermediate logics, in which the $${\lor}$$ -extension of each admissible rule is admissible. We prove that (...) any structural finitary consequence operator (for intermediate logic) can be defined by a set of $${\lor}$$ -extended rules if and only if it can be defined through a set of well-connected Heyting algebras of a corresponding quasivariety. As we exemplify, the latter condition is satisfied for a broad class of algebraizable logics. (shrink)

This note identifies and comments on selected crucial traits of Robert Aumann’s philosophy of game theory. In doing so, it aims at carving out and expressing some notions tacitly held by many working game theorists and ideally even at triggering subsequent reflection on the philosophy of game theory in general. According to my reconstruction of Aumann’s position, sophisticated, relatively precise rules of language—an ultra-refined grammar for interactions—constitute the heart of game theory. Consequently, the heart of game theory is devoid, or (...) almost devoid, of empirical content. The final section proposes a nomenclature for lucidly discussing the relationships between theories, different types of models, and “the real world” and employs it to explicate and slightly amend Aumann’s remarks on the role of truth and fruitfulness in game theory. (shrink)

The following study tries to elucidate the connection between the discourse of natural philosophy in the late eighteenth century and Wilhelm von Humboldt's anthropological, aesthetic and linguistic writings. The concepts of force, organism and, most significantly, of generation, as they were developed in the natural sciences, are shown to have strongly influenced Humboldt's philosophy. ;The first chapter reconstructs the scientific discussion about biological generation in the 18th century. At the end of the century, the widely accepted theory of (...) preformationism is challenged and replaced by the epigenetic model of generation, according to which each organism is individually produced by both parents and the workings of a formative force. ;The second chapter interprets the significance of this change for the philosophy of German Idealism, most notably in the works of Kant and Fichte. Epigenesis and its key concepts, such as "formative impulse" , organism and individuality is shown to provide a biological base for the idealist theories of subjectivity and freedom. ;The third chapter investigates Humboldt's involvement in the discourse and practice of natural philosophy during his studies at Gottingen and Jena. He discussed these problems frequently with his brother Alexander and his friends Schiller, Goethe and Fichte. His famous articles on the significance of sexual difference can be understood as a philosophical interpretation of his own scientific studies. ;The fourth chapter shows the main concepts of natural philosophy at work in Humboldt's mature writings about the philosophy of language. Against the backdrop of Goethe's scientific work, Humboldt's linguistic theory appears as an application of scientific notions to the "organism" of language. ;The fifth chapter concentrates on Humboldt's account of the mutual dependence and the mutual generation of language and thought. With his epigenetic account he tries to overcome the impasses of earlier 18th century theories of language. ;The last chapter focuses on the essential element in Humboldt's linguistic theory, the problem of articulation. Humboldt interprets articulation seen from the side of the subject as an act of violence, opposed to the material power of historically given languages. This interplay between violence and power is also shown to be at the center of Humboldt's hitherto unnoticed poetic works. (shrink)

This book presents a concise introduction to the epistemology and methodology of the Austrian School of economics as defended by Ludwig von Mises. The author provides an innovative interpretation of Mises’ arguments in favour of the a priori truth of praxeology, the received view of which contributed to the academic marginalisation of the Austrian School. The study puts forward a unique argument that Mises – perhaps unintentionally – defends a form of conventionalism. Chapters in the book include detailed discussions of (...) individualism, historicism, epistemological positions, and essentialism. The author goes on to discuss Mises’ justification of the fundamental axiom and proposes a conventionalist interpretation. By presenting praxeology as a conventionalist research programme, the author aims to reinvigorate the interaction between the Austrian School, mainstream economics, and the philosophy of science. This comprehensive reconstruction is suitable for economists interested in the history and philosophy of their discipline, as well as for philosophers of science. (shrink)