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Bloomington scholars are critical of the rather wide-spread “Model Platonism” of both Austrian and Chicago economists. Their empirical, B, perspective avoids the more extreme views of both Austrian “mindful economics,” A, and Chicago “mindless economics,” C. Yet the B is not a mere convex combination of A and C. It is rather a psychologically grounded empirical evidence-oriented approach that keeps clear of the non-empirical spirit of von Mises’ and Selten’s methodological dualism on one hand and the instrumentalist and behaviorist spirit of much of neo-classical economics on the other hand.

Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit is, by the author’s own account, “a study in ‘pure theory’.” From pure theory, the scientific method’s “successive approximations” explain empirical phenomena. But Knight did not fully develop the boundary conditions for theory. In this chapter, the author elucidates the demarcation of pure theory in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. For comparison and contrast, the author uses Mises’s Austrian aprioristic methodology praxeology and its strict distinction between theory and thymology. The author finds that Knight and Mises largely agree on the nature and importance of pure theory but differ on its meaning and use. The author’s findings suggest that Knight, while arguing for aprioristic pure theory, still places empirical observation first.

Experimental economics has been treated with skepticism by some Austrian economists. We argue that experimental methods are consistent with strong versions of praxeology, and are therefore not methodologically problematic for Austrians. We further argue that experimental research methods have illustrated many uniquely Austrian themes and provide a fruitful method for future Austrian-inspired research.

The papers collected here were written for the second biennial Wirth conference on Austrian Economics. The Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies sponsored the conference in cooperation with the University of Toronto in Mississauga. The conference was held from 17 to 18 October 2008 in Mississauga. The Wirth Institute has a natural home in Edmonton on the campus of the University of Alberta, which is a leading center for Central European Studies. The fact that the Institute has received support not only from government of Austria, but also from the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia reflects its historically minded recognition of the unique intellectual milieu of the Habsburg Empire. This intellectual milieu lasted beyond the breakup of the empire right through to the Anschluss in 1938. It is this milieu that shaped the Austrian school of economics and helped shape the context for the conference.

All chapters in this volume explore connections between certain streams in philosophy and OT. As the titles of the chapters suggest, most authors write about a particular philosopher or group of philosophers that makes up a distinct school of thought, summarize important aspects of his/their work and tease out the implications for OT. The central question authors explore is: ‘what does a particular philosophy contribute to OT?’ Whether addressing this question in historical terms (‘what has been the influence of a particular philosophy on the development of certain OT approaches?’), exploratory terms (‘what benefits to organizational analysis does a particular philosophy bring?’) or a combination of both, the end result is similar: particular philosophical issues, properly explained, are discussed in relation to important questions in OT.

This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of the Austrian school of economics, with specific emphasis on post-WWII developments. We provide a brief history and overview of the original theorists of the Austrian school in order to set the stage for the subsequent development of their ideas by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. In discussing the main ideas of Mises and Hayek, we focus on how their work provided the foundations for the modern Austrian school, which included Ludwig Lachmann, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. These scholars contributed to the Austrian revival in the 1960s and 1970s, which, in turn, set the stage for the emergence of the contemporary Austrian school in the 1980s. We review the contemporary development of the Austrian school and, in doing so, discuss the tensions, alternative paths, and the promising future of Austrian economics.

The chapter argues that, for the long-term successful survival of the Austrian School as a distinct school of thought, the work on the theory must not be sacrificed in the name of short-term success in producing applied pieces of scholarship and of communicating with the mainstream. Advances in modern work in pure theory and methodology provide a necessary glue connecting individual pieces of applied research – and the debates about boundaries of the school contribute toward the reappraisal of Austrian School identity.

When Beyond Positivism was published 35 years ago, it presented a compelling case for methodological change in the economics profession. That case remains equally compelling in the present day as, tragically, economics remains largely without the methodological pluralism at the heart of Beyond Positivism’s message. Among the costs of an environment of methodological myopia are widespread misinterpretations and the diversion of scholars from efforts at economic understanding to methodological wrangling, which we illustrate using the experience of Austrian economics in the 20th century. Beyond Positivism, we suggest, continues to provide the intellectual case for a pluralist discipline of economics, but one that requires complementary institutional reforms to come to fruition.