I don't get Pat Gunning's point. Nothing in the conference announcement indicated that "comparative advantage, the invisible hand etc" are out of bounds. I attended the EAEPE conference in Bremen a few years ago and found it to be very stimulating. 
 
Pat seems to assume that skepticism about mainstream tools is a symptom of mental derangement--the skeptics are "bonkers". But much of the best mainstream work in economics throughout the 20th century was aimed at seeing just how far you could go with comparative advantage, S&D theory, the quantity theory & so forth before the tidy textbook results broke down. My impression of EAEPE is that it wants to foster useful discussion about how economists can best cope with phenomena that are not easily encompassed by the conventional toolbox. What's wrong with that?
 
Gary Mongiovi