ABSTRACT
John Dewey warned in 1917 that philosophy, as an academic discipline, faced a crisis: it could continue down a path toward irrelevancy by increasingly becoming merely an aristocratic pastime of solving mental puzzles posed by professional philosophers, or it could recover itself by re-engaging with personal and public experience. Professional economists are increasingly recognizing that the traditional measure of economic well-being, namely, per capita gross domestic product, is a very poor indicator of how people actually experience the quality of their material existences. The crisis of Western science, of which the current crisis of economic science is a part, was centuries in the making. Ancient and scholastic natural law ethics rested upon the speculative, teleological metaphysics that new science had rejected, whereby morally proper human behavior conformed to people's presumably true and proper ends as humans. Moral philosophers came to see human societies as complex machines, rather than as living organisms.
