Author: Philip Mirowski File Type: pdf from a href=httpweb.missouri.edu~kleinppapersmirowski.pdfbook reviewaThe core of the volume, and easily the best essay, is the first chapter, Physics and the `Marginalist Revolution, an article that originally appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Economics in 1984. Here Mirowski offers the bold claims that (1) the distinguishing characteristic of the new marginalist economics of the 1870s and 1880s (at Manchester and Lausanne, at least) was not marginal utility at all, but the fact that the new theory was patterned explicitly after physics--in particular, the new physics of energy and the field--in a conscious and deliberate attempt to make economics more scientific and that (2) this same nineteenth-century energetics model has persisted as the basis of modern economics, even long after its abandonment in the physical sciences. This thesis, Mirowski says (pp. 24-25), explains a number of issues which have eluded other attempts at locating the hard core of neoclassical theory. . .First, it explains why neoclassical theory and mathematical formalism have been indissolubly wedded since the 1870s, even though a cogent defense of the necessity of the link has been notable by its absence.Second, it explains the success of neoclassicism in preempting other research programs in economics by means of the forceful claim that it is scientific, even though standards of scientific discourse in the larger culture have changed periodically during the last hundred years.Third, it explains the preference for techniques of constrained maximization over any other analytical techniques. . .Fourth, it explains the persistent use of an unobservable and unmeasureable value determinant--utility--in textbooks and in applied research, despite protestations that utility is not needed for neoclassical results. . .Fifth, it explains the modern controversy over the necessity for a microfoundation for macroeconomics, which can be interpreted as a complaint that Keynesian economics has not conformed to the hard core research strategy and is therefore somehow illegitimate. . .All these characteristics are borrowed from nineteenth century energetics.

Author: Patrick Colm Hogan File Type: pdf Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in neuroscientific and related research treating aesthetic response. This book integrates this research with insights from philosophical aesthetics to propose new answers to longstanding questions about beauty and sublimity. Hogan begins by distinguishing what we respond to as beautiful from what we count socially as beautiful. He goes on to examine the former in terms of information processing (specifically, prototype approximation and non-habitual pattern recognition) and emotional involvement (especially of the endogenous reward and attachment systems). In the course of the book, Hogan examines such issues as how universal principles of aesthetic response may be reconciled with individual idiosyncrasy, how it is possible to argue rationally over aesthetic response, and what role personal beauty and sublimity might play in the definition of art. To treat these issues, the book considers works by Woolf, Wharton, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Beethoven, Matisse, and Kiran Rao, among others. **Review In this book, Hogan works to bridge the humanities and sciences, a longstanding challenge when issues of beauty and aesthetics are involved. His distinction between public and personal beauty is a significant scholarly contribution that will surely spur debate. Pablo P. L. Tinio, Montclair State University, New Jersey and Editor, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts It will be clear to readers by the end of this book, that I like beauty quite a bit says Patrick Hogan a prediction that does not disappoint. An enthusiastically written, thought provoking book, which applies cognition, neuroscience, and social-cognitive scientific thinking to our understanding of the distinction between beauty, the beautiful and the sublime. I like this book quite a bit. Alex Forsythe, University of Liverpool Combining intimate and capacious knowledge of recent cognitive science research and social psychology with in-depth command of a global range of literary works, films, and cultures, Hogan offers a powerful challenge to long-established ways of theorizing aesthetics. Integrating the cognitive and affective, the formal and the contextual, the neurophysiological and the historical, Beauty and Sublimity speaks to resurgent discourses of aesthetic appreciation within contemporary humanities scholarship while providing such work rigorous, flexible, and fertile theoretical frameworks to engage and develop. Donald Wehrs, Hargis Professor of English Literature, Auburn University, Atlanta Book Description Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in neuroscientific and related research treating aesthetic response. This book integrates this research with the insights of philosophical aesthetics to propose new answers to longstanding questions about beauty and sublimity. To treat these issues, Hogan considers works by Woolf, Wharton, and Matisse, among others.