Peter J Boettke wrote:  
>John,  
>  
>You have to place Mises in his philosophic   
>context ... early Husserl and the   
>phenomenological tradition to see what he means   
>by those terms and what he wants to do with them   
>and how that relates to the neo-Kantian movement   
>in German language philosophy circa 1920.  
>  
>You cannot assume he means the same thing as we   
>mean today.  So you may need to be a bit more   
>careful in your reading before claiming that   
>Mises is beyond reason.  He fits clearly in the   
>continential traditions he is writing from.  You   
>can disagree with him and even disagree with an   
>entire tradition, but to do that you have to   
>step inside of that tradition an find the gaps on its own terms.  
>  
>Within the tradition Mises is writing in ---   
>there is a strict dichotomy of the natural and   
>cultural sciences (e.g., see Dilthey).  Mises's   
>original contribution was to argue that in the   
>sciences of human action you could derive "laws"   
>that had the same ontological status as the laws   
>of the natural sciences (even greater condidence   
>actually) but through different epistemological procedures.  
  
  
  I agree absolutely, but I think that Mises's   
"phenomenology" in fact comes off as a pure   
idealism and hence isn't phenomenological at all.   
I think that phenomenology itself arises in   
reaction to an overly empirical view of science.   
I have great sympathy for any reaction to pure   
empiricism, but a pure idealism is not the answer.  
  
While all this phenomenology stuff is great fun,   
and further, while I believe that all the   
ultimate terms in economics (man, society,   
liberty, freedom, and so forth) must find their   
meaning within a philosophic and theological   
discourse, it is equally true that Mises   
subtitled his work "A Treatise on Economics" and   
it is as economics that his methodology must be   
evaluated. Indeed, this is how economics holds up   
its end of the philosophic discourse, testing in   
a concrete realm what the philosophers provide in   
an abstract one. And this is precisely where, in   
my opinion, Miseanism (a better name then either   
Austrian or neo-Austrian) fails.  
  
  
John C. Medaille