4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Two biologists can agree on experimental findings yet disagree about what those findings warrant. For Felix Kaufmann, this gap exposes a tension in John Dewey’s account of inquiry: can the development of successful habits explain their authority as standards of judgement? This article defends Dewey’s effort to bring logic into contact with scientific practice while questioning its grounding in the genesis of habits. Kaufmann locates the stronger foundation in the explicit criteria scientists presuppose when submitting results and methods to criticism. His reconstruction shows how inquiry can reach definite conclusions without granting any conclusion immunity from revision—and why explaining how scientists behave is different from clarifying what justifies their inferences.
To state that no scientific result is indubitably established is not to declare that scientific problems cannot be solved.
Read as a demand for clarity rather than a refutation of reason, the foundational crises of modern mathematics, Cantorian antinomies, the intuitionist assault on excluded middle, the arithmetization of geometry, become in Kaufmann's hands symptoms of confusions in language and abstraction. Offered here in English translation, the essay grounds logic phenomenologically: language is not a stock of sounds but a system of rules coordinating signs with intended objects, so speaking about language clarifies rather than retreats. Russell's paradox does not topple logic; it shows what follows when predicates, classes, names, and functions are herded into one undifferentiated domain, and type theory is treated as a useful symbolic device short of the real philosophical solution. Number is derived from ordered counting, induction from the completeness of that form, and Brouwer's challenge is met with stricter interpretation rather than a rival logic.
We have emphasized that language is not a system of acoustic complexes and their configurations, but a system of co-ordinating rules between these and thoughts of objects and facts in the world.
Can investigating the business cycle bring it to an end? Felix Kaufmann makes that absurd prospect the closing joke of this satirical song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. His speaker distrusts scientific abstraction, demands that science feed a nation, and calls on the state to halt value-neutral inquiry. These complaints become comic through their excess: the critic of scientific methods cannot explain why engines run, while a renowned institute’s board leaves one man doing all the work. The song offers a compact encounter with methodological controversy turned into performance, where anxiety about science’s limitations gives way to fear of its improbable power.
A circle without its center becomes an affectionate joke about intellectual fellowship in Felix Kaufmann’s three-stanza song. Radii wander with nowhere to go, while π laments a wound measured to the thousandth decimal place. The mathematical conceit lets the Mises circle express attachment to its absent center without abandoning its taste for precision—or taking its own grief entirely seriously. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with the musical score, this small work offers a glimpse of shared scholarly language turned into sociable wit: calculation supplies the terms of sorrow, and the hoped-for return promises collective jubilation.
A seminar’s survival becomes a personal worry in Felix Kaufmann’s farewell song for Mises: Geneva cannot accommodate everyone, and Vienna’s departing scholars leave more than empty chairs behind. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and folk-song arrangement, the four stanzas mingle affectionate tribute with nervous humour. Drumming fingers and a recurring Latin lament sit alongside opposition to import taxes—a pointed reminder that friendship and economic conviction bound this circle together. The song offers a compact, intimate view of scholarly allegiance under the pressure of separation: its speaker honours the teacher’s new appointment while wondering what will become of the shared life he leaves behind.
Marginal utility becomes a farewell-party joke in Felix Kaufmann’s song for Stonier and Sweezy, presented here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. Sweezy plans to convert Harvard to the ideas he has encountered in Vienna, only to stumble over the difficulty of deciding what things are worth; Stonier voices his suspicions but promises to return for more argument. Kaufmann affectionately teases both intellectual conversion and resistance, setting theoretical vocabulary to a folk melody. The pleasure of this small occasional work lies in its tone: disagreement, uncertainty, and ambitious claims become reasons for laughter and a shared toast rather than obstacles to friendship.
Data may feed inquiry, but can they produce theory? Felix Kaufmann turns this methodological dispute into a three-stanza song, here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with an accompanying score. His satire respects the labor of collecting evidence while rejecting its claim to generate theory unaided; an obscure appeal to “natural value” fares no better. Yet the joke also reaches Professor Mises’ seminar, where evening argument promises certainty until dinner asserts a more bodily demand. The song’s distinctive pleasure lies in this double edge: theoretical conviction and affectionate mockery share the same table, allowing readers to encounter methodological loyalties in the lighter register of seminar sociability.
Hard problems melt like chocolate creams, and hungry seminar participants replenish themselves through “Import tariffs”: Felix Kaufmann’s song affectionately brings intellectual ambition down to the dinner table. In Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, this portrait of the Mises Circle makes debate and conviviality parts of the same pleasure. Yet its confidence briefly falters: why keep questioning when life flows on regardless? The answer—a resolve to take a stand—gives the returning refrain a seriousness its exuberant praise of truth might initially conceal. This small work offers a distinctive glimpse of scholarly fellowship expressed through jokes, shared appetites, and the feeling of being at home in argument.
An economist’s books have no buyers: in Felix Kaufmann’s comic song, even the defence of marginal utility suffers from insufficient demand. A Vienna-trained scholar greets his school’s supposed demise with theatrical despair, turning Menger’s work into a devotional object and his pen into a dagger—until economic polemics summon him back to battle. Set to Schumann’s music with an acknowledged debt to Heine, the song makes scholarly allegiance look at once ridiculous and resilient. Its humour lies in the uneasy overlap between devotion to a theory and concern for one’s own professional survival. Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and arrangement preserve this small drama of intellectual loyalty, in which economic terminology itself joins the heroic posturing.
An invitation to refute a doctrine becomes comic when the speaker declares in advance that no critic can succeed. Felix Kaufmann’s two-stanza song turns economic conviction into a performance of certainty: marginal utility supplies the recurring answer, while Vienna claims privileged access to liberalism’s reasons. The sharper joke concerns values, which the speaker holds at a distance before insisting that thought cannot proceed without them. In Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, with music by Gustav Pick, readers encounter a compact satire of theoretical allegiance and methodological self-contradiction. Although the title names Mises and Mayer, the lyrics leave their respective positions unassigned; the interest lies in the confident voice and the tensions it cannot quite conceal.
A scientist writes through the night until a methodologist compares his prose to beer foam and dismisses his a priori assumptions. In Felix Kaufmann’s satirical song, scholarly correction becomes mock-tragic catastrophe: the manuscript turns to ashes, taking its author’s sense of purpose with it. Yet the scientist’s increasingly elaborate “knots” of thought leave his own intellectual pretensions exposed. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, with music by Friedrich Silcher and an acknowledged debt to Heinrich Heine, this miniature stages a pointed tension between critical scrutiny and the confidence inquiry requires. Its comedy lies in the disproportion between a methodological rebuke and the ruin it brings.