One more item for the to do list

With my rather weak memory, I recall Roderick T. Long has been published in academic journals. He has written on Aristotle, perhaps even something relating Aristotle to rights, but I'll have to check my notes. But if I was aware that he was libertarian and Austrian school I had forgotten. Or I never made the connection between Roderick T. Long the philosopher and the Roderick T. Long whose writings appeared at LRC. His website (blog) and his archive at LRC. I (re-)discovered his website after doing some searches today on praxeology, as this morning I came across this post at The American Catholic: Thomas Woods and His Critics, The Austrian vs. Distributist Debate Among Catholics.

This essay (pdf) attempts to show Austrian economics can be a science as Aristotle defines it, but I am not convinced by the attempt. (The author makes use of Long's work on Aristotle.) Up until now I have been content with reading the general claims made by Austrian school members and Catholics who uphold Catholic Social Teaching and distributists. But in order to gain a better understanding of what they mean by science, and judge for myself whether their general claims can be supported by what they lay out, I'll have to read the big works by Ludgwig von Mises and others, such as Human Action and Man, Economy, and State. (Murray Rothbard on rights: The Ethics of Liberty.) Many laymen who are friendly to or critical of Austrian school economics have used "science" equivocally, and it is necessary to grasp how the Austrians define science and their method, and whether this can be reconciled with Aristotelian logic. Is the axiomatic-deductive method employed by the Austrians similar wot what Spinoza attempted to do with his treatment of ethics? It would appear that this is the method is how they try to attain the certitude and necessity that characterizes a science, but it may be the wrong way to go. Despite any possible denial by the Austrians, even their version of economics is more a practical science than a speculative science, and certitude must be achieved in another way. (See Fr. William Wallace, O.P.'s The Role of Demonstration in Moral Theology, which discusses how demonstration differs for speculative and practical sciences.)