by Bob Layson
http://www.la-articles.org.uk/mises.htm
When this philosophy student eventually encountered the writings of Ayn Rand, circa 1977, he was immune to her, how should it be put, banalysis of the central problems of philosophy and her Mr Toad like dismissal of ‘those gentlemen up at Oxford’. Indeed, I felt rather embarrassed on her behalf. Rather as one feels when watching someone in a karaoke bar putting on a great show and never hitting a note in the middle. With Mises the experience was quite different. Admittedly, his claims for the ‘apodeictic certainty’ and empirical content of a priori reasoning in economics seemed so much to run full tilt into the arguments of Hume that – even with the aid of Kantian philosophy, neo and otherwise – he seemed certain only to choke on what he had bitten off. Nevertheless, the house that von Mises built struck me as an imposing one with or without its so-called foundations. I even had a suspicion that what Mises regarded as truths synthetic, empiric and a priori would prove more palatable to philosophers and others if taken to be analytic, tautological and, in all practice, indispensable. Continue reading →