Dear all,

This Wednesday, on March 12th, Tony Lawson will be presenting at the HPPE seminar on the topic “Why bother with social ontology?”

The seminar takes place in room EAS E 168 in the East Building (at the London School of Economics) at 1 pm. Everyone is welcome.


Abstract:

Modern economics is widely recognised to be in something of a crisis. Most attempts to improve the discipline however are unsuccessful.  I argue that this is because critics mostly fail to unearth the real causes of the discipline’s problems. As a result most suggested solutions are effectively more of the same. Understanding the nature of the discipline's problems and moving towards a real solution can be helped, I argue, and likely requires, a turn to philosophy in the form of social ontology.  


About the presenter:

Tony Lawson works in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. His work spreads over various fields, but it focuses primarily in the philosophy of social sciences, in particular social ontology. Initially trained as a mathematician, over the last twenty five years Lawson founded and chaired the Cambridge Realist Workshop and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group, and served as the director of the Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. He is an editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, sits in the editorial board of Feminist Economics, he is a member and trustee of the associated Cambridge Political Economy Society, and a joint founder of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy.
Amongst his publications are the Routledge monographs Economics and reality (1997) and Reorienting economics (2003). Numerous journal symposia and publications by others have been devoted to his work, most recently Edward Fullbrook’s Ontology and economics: Tony Lawson and his critics (2009).


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