================= HES POSTING ====================== Pat, I would say that in, for example, Ludwig Mises' talk of what he calls "the action axiom", in Mises picture of the natural sciences, and in his general picture of economics as an apriori deductive science you find all sorts of elements of the broad sort of intellectual picture brought with the formalist conception of logic, language, knowledge, and mathematics. What distinguishes Mises is an odd mix of the old Kant picture and more recent formalist conceptions. Of course, Ludwig Mises picture was known to a great number of Vienna researchers. Of course, as many are aware, Richard Mises, Ludwig Mises brother, ran the famous Vienna seminar in mathematics. Mises view was also widely known among socialists and Marxist, as Mises had participated in Bohm-Bawerk's important seminar, in which a number of the most influential socialists and Marxists also participated. More generally, the picture of knowledge and understanding advanced by Menger and Bohm-Bawerk was at the core of widely known research efforts in the theory of knowledge and under- standing, a central part of the mix of the ideas of Weber, Brentano, Mach, Helmhotz, Neurath, Husserl and others that competed and played off one another regardless of special science, i.e. semantics, value theory, theory of history, mathematics, social science, epistemology, etc. Some of this interanimation is well capture in Nancy Cartwright, et als, new book _Otto Neurath_, Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press. As just one example of these cross currents, karl Popper as a very young man was familiar with the work of Bohm-Bawerk and Menger, and many of his innovations in the theory of the advance of knowledge reflect insights first found in the work of Menger and Bohm-Bawerk -- later Popper influenced Friedman in the Spring of 1947 at the first Mont Pelerin meeting, just prior to the first effort by Friedman at work on his famous essay on the logican logical and knowledge status of economics -- a work which itself may have been inspired in part (as had Hutchison's 1938 book) in reaction to Mises synthetic aprior defense of economics and a liberal social order (just as Hayek's work in the same area was largely inspired in reaction to Mises). Furthermore, members of Mises seminar participated also in Schlick's seminar in logic, semantics, and epistemology, as well as in Hayek's seminar in the broad areas of philosophy and culture. Through these links ideas in the phenomenology of Husserl, the logic of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, and the theory of knowledge of Schlick, Wittgenstein, Mach, Carnap, and Neurath cross fertilized. Schumpeter's early embrace of both Mach, Menger and Walras seems also to have been widely known -- especially through Schumpeter's concept of 'methodological individualism', a notion debated by later logicians and philosophers like Popper, etc., also in part, as a result of Hayek's later influential contribution to the conversation on this topic. Greg Ransom Dept. of Philosophy UC-Riverside [log in to unmask] http://members.gnn.com/logosapien/ransom.htm ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]