Economics, Philosophy and the Neglect of Labour
William Dixon and Jan Derry

This seminar brings together two perspectives connected to Geoff Kay’s work and its continuing significance. William Dixon will outline Kay and Mott’s central argument that modern economics and philosophy rest on a distorted view of labour, focusing on the separation of needs and capacities in the concept of labour competence and the way this obscures the purposive nature of human activity. Jan Derry will reflect on the influence of Kay’s work on her own thinking, drawing connections with inferentialism and suggesting that both labour and learning are best understood as reason and end-governed practices rather than as merely causal or measurable processes.

William Dixon’s work in economics argues that economic behaviour is fundamentally moral in character, rather than reducible to means–ends rationality. He suggests that human activity is enabled by a power that is itself moral. He has published widely in the history and philosophy of economics, including A History of Homo Economicus (with David Wilson, Routledge, 2012) and ‘Economics as Ethical Pre-condition of the Credit Crunch’ in Virtue and Economy (Routledge, 2015).

Jan Derry works on philosophical psychology and the relationship between epistemology and pedagogy. Her research draws on inferentialism and Vygotskian approaches, and she is the author of Vygotsky, Philosophy and Education and Knowledge in Education: Why Philosophy Matters.