Throughout 2022, we celebrate the 25th birthday of the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics through a series of events:
- Three Kickoff Lectures by EIPE associates and alumni, on March 4th, 2022
- Three Midterm Lectures by leading scholars in the field of philosophy and economics, on September 23rd, 2022
- Special guests at our monthly EIPE research seminars in the Fall of 2022 and Spring of 2023: Kangyu Wang (LSE), Lee Elkin (EIPE), Uskali Mäki (Helsink, co-founder of EIPE), Richard Pettigrew (Bristol), Roger Crisp (Oxford), and Dana Sisak (EUR).
Please click on the links to find out more about each of these events.
A very brief history of EIPE
Although it is hard to pin down an exact date of its conception, it is safe to say that EIPE’s history started in 1997. In that year, Uskali Mäki was appointed chair in Philosophy of Science at the Faculty of Philosophy of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). Around his inaugural lecture, a big conference called “Fact or Fiction in Economics: Perspectives on Realism and Economics” was organized in which most of the main protagonists of Philosophy of Economics around the world featured (including Mark Blaug, Robert Sugden, Nancy Cartwright, Kevin Hoover, Mary Morgan, Roger Backhouse, Philip Petit, Bruce Caldwell, Neil De Marchi, Deirdre McCloskey and Wade Hands; published in 2002 as “Fact and Fiction in Economics: Models, Realism and Social Construction” with CUP).
As it happened, within the EUR, there were many practitioners of philosophy of economics at other departments and faculties (including Maarten Janssen, Arjo Klamer, John Groenewegen). Drawing on these synergies and common interests, Jack Vromen, Albert Jolink, and Uskali Mäki applied for funding at the Erasmus University to start up a new institute.
EIPE’s history and growth since then have not been perfectly linear. The past decade however, the institute has grown almost incessantly, from three staff members (Jack Vromen, Conrad Heilmann, and Constanze Binder) and only a few PhD students to a total of now seven permanent staff members, three postdoctoral researchers, and more than ten ongoing PhD projects.