3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A jurisprudence resting solely on the ground of logic — that is the ambition of Kaufmann's outline of a "pure theory of law," which takes Kelsen's reine Rechtslehre and grounds it in Husserl's phenomenology of essence, against every empiricism that dissolves validity into fact. Jurisprudence becomes exact, he insists, only when it stops deriving its concepts from psychology, power, purpose, or moral value. A norm is not an imperative bound to a commander's will but an objectivation of a stance; the legal proposition is a double norm — a subject ought to act, and if it does not, a consequence ought to follow toward that subject — whose juristic core is formal imputation, not causality. From four ground concepts — person, behavior, fact, and ought — he generates the pure legal concepts, recasting the subjective right as nothing but the correlate of another's duty.
Jede theoretische Wissenschaft ist ein Inbegriff synthetischer Urteile a priori.
English translation: “Every theoretical science is a totality of synthetic a priori judgments.”
Does a stronger need explain an economic choice, or do we call the need stronger because that choice was made? This tension gives Felix Kaufmann’s 1923 study its critical edge. Drawing on Husserl’s distinction between material and formal concepts, Kaufmann asks what makes conduct economic, rather than what circumstances cause it. He challenges definitions grounded in scarcity or ranked purposes and treats marginal utility as a useful guide to empirical inquiry, not an independent psychological explanation. His alternative centres on behaviour that establishes an order of selection among goods, understood as relations to external things. The discussion of money sharpens the stakes: ranking goods does not yet mean measuring their values. Readers can discover where apparently explanatory economic concepts may merely redescribe the conduct they are meant to explain.
Legal concepts, Kaufmann argues, become intelligible only once the pure formal structure of law is stripped of everything empirical, psychological, sociological, and political clinging to it. Extending his earlier Logik und Rechtswissenschaft, this German study grounds jurisprudence in a general logic of science: the dualism of factual and essential knowledge, and a principle of compatibility spheres governing which predicates may belong to which domains. Against theories that define law by force, recognition, or fear of sanctions, Kaufmann insists that law is a totality of sanctioned norms, a double norm binding conduct to consequence, and that the juridical person is no metaphysical substance but a rule-governed unit of imputation. Fusing Husserlian phenomenology with Kelsen's pure theory, he traces legal validity to the Grundnorm and rejects natural law, since value-judgments admit no theoretical proof.
Recht ist ein Inbegriff sanktionierter Normen über menschliches Verhalten.
English translation: “Law is a totality of sanctioned norms concerning human conduct.”
Does recognizing the same object across different acts of thought require a special intuition of the object as a whole? In this review of Edith Landmann’s Die Transzendenz des Erkennens, Felix Kaufmann accepts the phenomenological distinction between a cognitive act and its object but challenges Landmann’s further claim that partial apprehensions depend upon a “total intention.” The disagreement becomes concrete in mathematics: numbers do not arise or disappear with counting, and Kaufmann resists making formal truths dependent on concrete existence. His sympathetic yet pointed assessment lets readers examine the step from intentionality to a hierarchy that places philosophical intuition above scientific knowledge—and see why admiration for a book’s subtlety need not entail acceptance of its governing premise.
If a preference is inferred from an exchange, can that same preference explain why the exchange occurred? Felix Kaufmann’s 1925 article makes such circularities central to its examination of economic theory. He distinguishes the concepts that define economic activity from the evidence needed to explain it, bringing an analysis of intentional action to bear on Austrian marginal utility theory. For Kaufmann, rankings of intended uses can guide inquiry, but cannot become necessary truths merely because they make choices intelligible. His scrutiny of economic measurement likewise locates substantive knowledge in the assumptions behind equations, not simply in their solution. The result offers a concrete way to distinguish what an economic model defines, what it assumes, and what it actually explains—without asking logic to replace empirical research.
For Felix Kaufmann, legal philosophy can support jurisprudence only if it rests on logic. This brief review of C. A. Emge’s Vorschule der Rechtsphilosophie makes that conviction the measure of its praise: Kaufmann welcomes Emge’s use of epistemological distinctions to approach fundamental legal problems. Yet logical grounding is not his only criterion. Recommending the book as an introduction for students, he also asks for clearer organization in a future edition. Rather than offering a substantive critique of Emge’s arguments, the review gives a compact statement of what Kaufmann expects from an introduction to legal philosophy: sound foundations joined to accessible presentation.
Felix Kaufmann’s brief review of the second, revised edition of Max Salomon’s Grundlegung zur Rechtsphilosophie separates the merit of arranging philosophical problems from agreement with their proposed solutions. Kaufmann declines to adjudicate Salomon’s doctrines, praising instead the book’s conceptual organization and its value for teaching legal philosophy. His substantial quotation from Salomon’s preface gives this restrained judgment a concrete setting: Salomon would prefer to rewrite the work, but lacks the leisure, and now sees deeper philosophical foundations as more pressing than elaborating individual doctrines. The notice offers a compact example of critical appraisal that recognizes clarity and intellectual seriousness without implying doctrinal endorsement.
Can a theory of the state explain its object without presenting political preferences as necessary truths? In this review essay on Hans Kelsen’s Allgemeine Staatslehre, Felix Kaufmann makes that methodological question the basis of his endorsement. He distinguishes what scientific reasoning can establish from the ultimate values it cannot prove, then examines Kelsen’s identification of state and legal order. His defence confronts a concrete objection: if the state is experienced as an effective social reality, why treat it as a system of norms? Kaufmann argues that understanding obedience still requires identifying what is obeyed. The essay offers readers a philosopher’s account of Kelsen’s legal theory—and a precise way to distinguish causal explanation, normative validity, and political judgement without declaring values irrelevant.
Just as the nineteenth century banished infinitesimals from analysis without destroying the calculus, Kaufmann proposes to eliminate the actual infinite, above all Cantor's uncountable, without dismantling classical mathematics. First published in 1930 and reissued here in 1968, this German study locates the root of foundational paradox in a single confusion: the failure to distinguish empirical from non-empirical claims about all objects and their existence. Set-theoretic totalities, on his reading, are an ontological surplus smuggled in through misread symbolism, not objects the mind discovers. He preserves the finite core of the diagonal argument while denying that it defines a totality of all decimals, invokes the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem to argue that axiomatic set theory cannot isolate a genuinely uncountable domain, and reads Hilbert's ideal elements and Brouwer's constructivism as each carrying only part of the truth.
Ein „sinnloses Zeichen“ ist eine contradictio in adjecto, denn in der Behauptung, daß visuelle oder akustische Phänomene „Zeichen“ sind, liegt diejenige eingeschlossen, daß man durch sie etwas verstehen, mit ihrer Hilfe fremde Gedanken erfassen kann.
English translation: “A "meaningless sign" is a contradictio in adjecto, for the assertion that visual or acoustic phenomena are "signs" already contains the assertion that through them one can understand something, that with their help one can grasp the thoughts of others.”
A determinate shade of colour and a natural number supply the sharpest point of disagreement in Felix Kaufmann’s review of Wilhelm Burkamp’s Begriff und Beziehung. Kaufmann treats both as eidetic singularities, logically distinct from concrete individuals—a distinction he believes Burkamp underestimates. This precise objection accompanies strong approval of Burkamp’s critique of class logic. Against the background of set-theoretic paradoxes, the review shows Kaufmann weighing a philosopher’s response to problems often left to mathematical specialists. Its interest lies in that discriminating judgement: readers encounter both his criterion for assessing an account of individuality and Burkamp’s proposal that logic differs from mathematics through its task of determining the unknown from the known, rather than through formal structure alone.
When formalism, intuitionism, and logicism each stake a claim to the foundations of mathematics, the deeper trouble, Kaufmann contends, is one of sense: symbolic forms, abstractions, and abbreviations get mistaken for independent objects. This 1931 essay reworks the received theory of abstraction, recasting it not as the stripping-away of features but as the holding-fixed of an invariant structure while others vary, and turns it against conceptual realism and extensional logic alike. Expressions like properties of properties and functions of functions are legitimate only as translatable abbreviations. Natural number, on this account, is neither a class of equinumerous classes nor a property of collections but an abstraction from the ordered act of counting; Peano's axioms define that structure, and complete induction merely excludes further determinations. Undecidability, where it appears, signals not metaphysical depth but presuppositions that have failed to fix their object.
The central problem in the theory of a science lies in clearly grasping the sense of the relevant propositions.
Calculus can locate a monopolist’s maximum profit—but who establishes the demand and cost functions on which the calculation depends? In this 1931 article, Felix Kaufmann uses that distinction to reconsider what mathematics contributes to economics. His perspective joins the logical analysis of mathematical proof to an insistence on understanding economic motives: neither formal deduction nor price curves alone supply an empirical theory of action. Against both blanket objections to mathematization and overconfident analogies with physics, he asks when simplifying assumptions make inquiry productive and when they merely make calculation possible. Readers gain a precise way to distinguish computational success from economic discovery, and to examine what assumptions about continuity, measurement, and choice permit a model to explain.