Ludwig von Mises

Carl Menger was the founder of the Austrian School of economics, famous for contributing to the development of the theory of marginal utility, which contested the cost-of-production theories of value, developed by the classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Menger was born in... Nowy Sącz in Austrian Galicia, now in Poland. He was the son of a wealthy family of minor nobility; his father, Anton, was a lawyer. His mother, Caroline, was the daughter of a wealthy Bohemian merchant. He had two brothers, Anton and Max, both prominent as lawyers. After attending Gymnasium he studied law at the Universities of Prague and Vienna and later received a doctorate in jurisprudence from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In the 1860s Menger left school and enjoyed a stint as a journalist reporting and analyzing market news, first at the Lemberger Zeitung in Lwów, Ukraine and later at the Wiener Zeitung in Vienna. During the course of his newspaper work he noticed a discrepancy between what the classical economics he was taught in school said about price determination and what real world market participants believed.
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Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th century Enlightenment. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences using reason and logic. This stood in sharp contrast... to the skepticism and lack of agreement or progress in empiricist philosophy. Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason , aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume. He stated: Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that: Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history.
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Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views. Brentano was born at Marienberg am... Rhein, near Boppard. He studied philosophy at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Berlin and Münster. He had a special interest in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy. He wrote his dissertation in Tübingen On the manifold sense of Being in Aristotle. Subsequently he began to study theology and entered the seminary in Munich and then Würzburg. He was ordained a Catholic priest on August 6, 1864. In 1865/66 he wrote and defended his habilitation essay and thesis and began to lecture at the University of Würzburg. His students in this period included, among others, Carl Stumpf and Anton Marty. Between 1870 and 1873 Brentano was heavily involved in the debate on papal infallibility. A strong opponent of such dogma, he eventually gave up his priesthood and his tenure in 1873 and in 1879 left the church altogether.
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Frank Albert Fetter was an American economist of the Austrian School. Fetter's treatise, The Principles of Economics, contributed to an increased American interest in the Austrian School, including the theories of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich... Hayek. Fetter notably debated Alfred Marshall, presenting a theoretical reassessment of land as capital. Fetter's arguments have been credited with prompting mainstream economists to abandon the Georgist idea "that land is a unique factor of production and hence that there is any special need for a special theory of ground rent." A proponent of the subjective theory of value, Fetter emphasized the importance of time preference and rebuffed Irving Fisher for abandoning the pure time preference theory of interest that Fisher had earlier espoused in his 1907 book, The Rate of Interest. Frank Fetter was born in Peru, Indiana to a Quaker family during the height of the American Civil War. Fetter proved an able student as a youth, as demonstrated by his acceptance to Indiana University in 1879 when he was only sixteen years old.
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