ABSTRACT
Tradition has it that the founders of mainstream economics were William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger and Leon Walras. Hermeneutics was originally the art, or skill, of exegesis— of interpreting the Scriptures. Prior to the Reformation this skill was exercised on firm grounds of Catholic dogma and tradition. With Martin Luther's translation of the Bible from Latin into German, however, a different need for exegesis arose, one that did away with the dogma and tradition of the Roman church and, instead, explained and interpreted the Bible in a way that it could be used as a guide in everyday life. In the philosophical field, according to the Romantics, Descartes and his epigones had got it all wrong. Dualism, mechanism, the sterility of "clear and distinct ideas" and a rigid determinism had set modern philosophy off in the wrong direction.
