The Department of Philosophy & the Provost’s Office at CEU

cordially invite you to a public lecture by

ALEX ROSENBERG

Duke University

on

                                                                                                                                                                                            on

From Rational Choice to Reflexivity: Learning from Sen, Keynes, Hayek, and Soros

at 17:30 on Wednesday, November 21, 2012

CEU-Auditorium, 1051 Bp., Nádor u. 9.

This lecture identifies the major failings of mainstream economics and the rational choice theory it relies upon. These failures were identified by the four figures mentioned in the title: economics treats agents as rational fools; by the time the long run equilibrium arrives, we are all dead; the social, political and economic institutions that meet most urgent human needs most effectively could not have been the result of rational choice, but their "spontaneous order" needs to be explained; human uncertainty and reflexivity prohibit a predictively useful rational choice approach to human affairs, and even limit its role in institution design. The upshot is not a counsel of despair for social science but a guide to the kind of knowledge that the guidance of policy--public and private--really needs.

Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, where is also professor of biology and political science. Rosenberg has been a visiting professor and fellow of the at the Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, visiting lecturer at Oxford University  and a visiting fellow at the Research School of Social Science, of the Australian National University. In 1993 Rosenberg received the Lakatos Award in the philosophy of science. In 2007 he held a fellowship at the National Humanities Center. In the same year he was also the Phi Beta Kappa-Romanell Lecturer. He is the author of many books in the philosophy of social and biological sciences.