Review of Julian Reiss ’ s Philosophy of economics : a

Writing a textbook on philosophy of economics presents some hard challenges. Neither philosophy nor economics is sufficiently defined and circumscribed to make an overview easy. The nature of philosophy is currently quite contested. The naturalism movement exemplified by Quine now competes with a very traditional, conceptual-analysis trend that gives limited place to science (and thus by implication to economics). Philosophy of science—which is at the heart of naturalism— has mostly moved away from broad issues such as the nature of confirmation or explanation to a close engagement with specific sciences, in large part because it seems not all that much can be said about explanation, confirmation and the like in the abstract. Economics has grown tremendously in terms of tools and topics. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to identify the core of economics with static general equilibrium theory. Game theory, new institutional economics, and experimental economics—all applied to an increasingly wide range of phenomena—make it nearly impossible to talk about philosophical issues in the field as a whole. Aside from these problems, a textbook in philosophy of economics confronts a problem of audience. Is the target philosophy students? If it is, then how is philosophy of economics supposed to be done for students without much knowledge of economics, especially if the goal is to do philosophy of science close to the science itself? If the target is economics students (though I doubt that more than a handful of economics departments offer such a course—mine does not), what distinguishes the course from an ordinary economics course on whatever part of economics is considered? Julian Reiss's new book reflects these inevitable tensions but largely does an admirable job of confronting them. Reiss deals with the ever larger scope and available tools of economics and with the philosophy of science imperative to engage closely with the science by covering an enormous range of work in economics in a fair amount of detail, as well