Róna, Peter
Zsolnai, László
2020-11-20T14:32:32Z
2020-11-20T14:32:32Z
2020
978-3-030-26113-9
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12010/15847
It is quite difficult to make sense of an event without having a notion as to why and
how it happened. Indeed, we often have an anxious sense of doubt and uncertainty
about something that we know has happened if we have no or only an inadequate
idea of the circumstances bringing it about. As Elizabeth Anscombe recollected in
the first two sentences of her introduction to Volume II of her collected papers,1
‘My
first strenuous interest in philosophy was in the topic of causality. I didn’t know that
what I was interested in belonged to philosophy’. Causality and – as some of the
papers in this volume argue – agency are with us even when we are not aware of it,
so much so that the questions of the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ not only affect what we
know but also are quite fundamental to judgements; no system of morality, no ethical
norm can do without them, and even aesthetics cannot lack some conception of the
agent. Causation and agency, therefore, affect and permeate all of philosophy ranging from metaphysics through epistemology and ethics all the way to aesthetics.
Causal and agency questions are fundamental to all branches of the social sciences as well, and the failure to thoroughly explore them, to specify their role in the
theory or model being defended, lies behind many of the disappointments the social
sciences, particularly economics, have suffered. The unfulfilled aspiration of the
latter to keep pace with the successes of the natural sciences has been regularly
noted, at least since the birth of rationalist thought. Kant, for example, in a footnote
to the introductory chapter to his Critique of Pure Reason2
objects to the complaints
about the ‘shallowness of the present age, and the decay of profound science’ but
acknowledges that there is a problem with the social sciences
178 páginas
application/pdf
eng
Springer
Economics
Agency and causal explanation in economics
Ciencias sociales
Economía
Economía -- Aspectos sociales
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Abierto (Texto Completo)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26114-6
http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_2f33
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