Tag Archives: philosophy

Some tools for the brave new world of right now

As we muster our scholarly resources to try and figure out what is what in the brave new world that we have tumbled into – have been tumbling into for a while, perhaps – here are three things from the archives that might have something to say. Two of them are book chapters, so they haven’t had the airtime that they perhaps deserve. They were published a few years ago and so I’m reproducing them here. The third is a BBC radio essay from 2011, The Entrepreneur.

Who Was René Girard? wonders the Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/evolution-of-desire-review-who-was-rene-girard-1527886927

First up is a chapter I wrote on sacrifice and management, for a collected volume on the works of Rene Girard.

Continue reading “Some tools for the brave new world of right now”

Educating economists on BBC Radio 3

How should we teach economics? That’s the question raised by economics students all over the world, who have signed up to a petition for pluralist economics, an economics  in touch with history, philosophy, and (God forbid) the rest of the social sciences. It seems pretty reasonable to me, although students would have to wake up to some tricky problems about the nature of economics science if they got what they wanted. On the other hand, you might say that scientists don’t need to know philosophy of science to be, say, biologists, and that’s true too. Perhaps if you want to study society, you should study sociology, and that’s more or less what Manchester University’s economics faculty said to its students. To me it seems that problem is just as much our expectations of economics, and the place in society that economics expects. Anyway, that’s enough for now; if you want to hear me and Professor Geoffrey Wood arguing the case on BBC Radio 3’s Freethinking, you can do so here.