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David Stove’s book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies is a remarkable collection of essays. As a staunch positivist ,the author is not impressed with most of what constitutes “philosophy” (or the quality of our thinking in general). As Stove laments in the preface, “there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories.” But [...]

Today is the second anniversary of Depressed Metabolism. As of writing, this website has close to 200 feed subscribers. On an average day the website has 150 unique visitors, which is an encouraging increase in traffic since our last update. This is even more remarkable in light of the fact that new blog entries with [...]

In his classic book Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) Terence W. Hutchison  makes the case for economics as an empirical science.
An interesting aspect about this book is the ease with which Terence W. Hutchison uses logical empiricist authors like Moritz Schlick, Rudulf Carnap, and Otto Neurath but also the “critical rationalist” Karl [...]

How seriously should we take William Warren  Bartley’s The Retreat to Commitment? Despite its emphasis on critical inquiry, the work has a lot of elements that would place the book in a more obscure tradition.
The first thing that strikes the reader is the enormous number of pages that are devoted to the “search for identity” [...]

The philosopher Karl Popper has published on a wide variety of subjects but his most lasting contribution is his answer to the problem of induction by drawing attention to the asymmetry between verification and falsification. A theory can never be proven, but it can be falsified. Popper’s falsification criterion can also be used  to distinguish [...]