Occasional Economics
This proposed new course will explore how economists might renew their academic discipline by using a combination of philosophical occasionalism and fractal geometry. George Berkeley, Jonathan Edwards, Arnold Geulincx, Nicholas Malebranche and others were occasional philosophers.
They believed that the human mind does not interact directly with matter including the human body. Instead, the mind interacts with matter indirectly. Since nineteenth-century and twentieth-century economic science was largely based on Adam Smith's work, therefore we will begin our course by imagining that Smith had used occasional philosophy. Later economists would then have had different theories of causation, different theories of luck or chance, different theories of the connection of economics to morality, and a different set of tools for mathematical analysis.