At the frontiers between economics and philosophy lie many intriguing questions concerned with methodology, rationality, ethics, and normative social and political philosophy.

These questions are diverse, as are the responses that have been given to them. Although different works in philosophy of economics may be related to one another in many ways, philosophy of economics is not a single unified enterprise. It is a collection of separate inquiries linked to one another by connections among the questions and by the dominating influence of mainstream economic models and techniques. Economics is of particular interest to those interested in epistemology and philosophy of science because of its detailed peculiarities and because it resembles the natural sciences, while its object consists of social phenomena. This essay will address only epistemological and ontological issues concerning economics.

1.