Philosophy and Methodology

Is it justifiable to accept money from government? Almost always, say Jonathan Gress and Walter Block--but not for everyone.

Mises: "The experience with which the sciences of human action have to deal is always an experience of complex phenomena. No laboratory experiments can be performed with regard to human action."

Metaphysical principles of political life discovered by Aristotle and clarified by Thomas Aquinas can provide a framework of political philosophy that is compatible with the Austrian school.

The socialists cannot help admitting that capitalism has the tendency to improve the material conditions of mankind. But, they say, it has diverted men from the higher and nobler pursuits.

When people think of Rothbard as a philosopher, they often have in mind only his work in ethics and political philosophy, but he wrote about other areas of philosophy as well.

I want to use an argument someone directed against Rawls to illustrate a basic principle of how we should read texts.

The rule of the many by the few we call tyranny; the rule of the few by the many is tyranny also ... "You shall do as we will, and not as you will," is in either case the declaration.

Identitarians present a parody of human rights: only approved groups are recognized as victims. Unapproved individuals are lost in the balkanization despite the fact that, in the final analysis, only individuals suffer and cry out for help.

Postmodernism lends itself to totalitarianism. Once beliefs aren't constrained by the object world, an idea can't be wrong, and the intellectual battleground becomes a political one, a struggle to impose certain ideas on all.

It is striking that the major resurgence of Scholastic ideas came out of Austria in the late 19th century, a country that had avoided a revolutionary political or theological upheaval. If we look at Menger's own teachers, we find successors to the Scholastic tradition.