> This is from my secret life as a Critical Realist. I should provide an explanation, but the people on these lists are pretty savvy. Suffice to say, It has to do with the role and place (and actual/perceived necessity) of mathematics and formalism in economics. This was, actually, the philosophical basis of my doctorate. I would love to hear everyone's views.
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> http://ineteconomics.org/video/conference-kings/mathematical-formalism-and-political-economic-content-duncan-foley
I watched this when the conference happened last year, so I'm hazy on the details but I think Foley is great. I read a great long interview with him recently (from one of those books of interviews by economists of economists... for economists (a genre with a whole Dewey Decimal to itself I'm sure)). I had no idea beforehand that he had a history in technical general equilibrium going back to the 1960s, before getting into Marx in the 1970s, or that he is considered quite respectable in mainstream economics for his work on complexity. He was radicalised by the Vietnam War then mesmerised by Capital. In the interview he laughs that his most cited journal article has been the one he wrote on the transformation problem, published in RRPE in 1982, which he says very few of his colleagues would have any idea about.
The whole interview is very interesting on his trials and tribulations as a leftist economist in and out of the Ivy League, and about how his ideas have evolved. In an aside, he mentions that Samuelson and Solow (who were his colleagues at MIT) felt more threatened by Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium theory than by Sraffa et al. I can send the pdf if you like.
What was your doctorate on, Ismail?
Mike Beggs