The point is to raise questions about the role of history, 
institutional connections, and personal histories on the development 
of contemporary intellectual practices and institutional arrange- 
ments, not to definitively answer questions for all time, many of which 
can never be answered according to the mistake demands of 'proof' 
demanded by the intellectual working under the influence of the dead 
ideas of Plato and Descartes.  The causal role played by the contingency 
of history can do much to problematize contemporary pictures of the 
inevitability of the temporary current configuration of intellectual and 
institutional partices and arrangements down dominant in the Universities, 
much as the work of S. J. Gould on the contingency of history in Darwinian 
biology has helped to problematize contemporary 'just so' stories about 
the inevitability of current adaptive survivors in the biological domain 
of evolving species and species attributes. 
 
Being scholarly means making good judgments based one deep background 
skills acquired over years for doing such things.  It does't mean we can 
every 'prove' anything in the sense demanded by Plato and Descartes, 
knowledge is fallible, and depends on background skill.  A Web page 
charting 
intellectual relationships in economics would generate interest, questions, 
arguments, knowledge, and awareness which would help economists and those 
in other fields interested in economics to have better skill in 
understanding 
what the field of economics has been all about, and how it (contingently) 
got that way --  controversy, disagreements in good judgment, and debate 
can 
all constribute to the advance of understanding of economics -- all gained 
through a greater appreciation of the history of economics, provoked by the 
facination of personal histories, and controversies about how to interpret 
that history, something that is today sorely lacking among most 
professional 
economists, and professional students of contemporary economics.  (I can 
provide confessionals and data on this from Colander, Klamer, Boland, 
and McCloskey, among many others, if you need them). 
 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
UC-Riverside 
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