Weyl’s ‘agens theory’ of matter and the Zurich Fichte

This paper investigates Hermann Weyl’s reception of philosophical concepts stemming from the German Idealist Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In particular, Weyl’s ‘agens theory’ of matter, which he held around 1925, will be looked at. In the extant literature, the—admittedly also important—influence of Husserl on Weyl has mainly been addressed. Thus, apart from investigating some detailed Fichtean inheritances in Weyl’s concepts of causality, chance and continuity, the general difference which Weyl saw between the philosophies of Fichte and Husserl will also be discussed. For Weyl this is above all a difference between an active constructivism and a rather passive phenomenological seeing (Schau). Further, the paper shows in some detail the way Weyl was drawn into a certain reading of Fichte by his Zurich colleague, the philosopher Fritz Medicus. The methodological frame of the paper is that of Konstellationsforschung, a historical and systematic approach which proves to be particularly fruitful when investigating a (broadly speaking) German Idealist context and which allows special attention to be given to the acting subjects within the constellation under investigation. Conversely, Weyl’s agens theory suggests amendments to this methodology.     

Hermeneutical contributions to the history of science: Gadamer on ‘presentism’

This article examines how Hans G. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics can contribute to contemporary debates on the concept of ‘presentism’. In the field of the history of science, this term is usually employed in two ways. First, ‘presentism’ refers to the kind of historiography which judges the past to legitimate the present. Second, this concept designates the inevitable influence of the present in the interpretation of the past. In this paper, I argue that both dimensions of the relationship between the present and the past are explored by Hans G. Gadamer in Truth and Method and other texts. In the first place, Gadamer’s critique of historicism calls into question the anti-presentist ideal of studying the past for ‘its own sake’. In the second place, Gadamer’s thesis that all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice poses the question of the inherent “present-centredness” of historical interpretations. By examining Gadamer’s hermeneutics, I seek to provide historians with new arguments and perspectives on the question of ‘presentism’.     

The uses and abuses of ‘consensus’ forecasts

Clemen's (1989) review of the forecast-combining literature amply illustrates both the interest in and the importance of this subject. This article stresses the tautological properties of various consensus measures that assure their success relative to most individual forecasts. It confirms the finding of earlier studies that for each specific macroeconomic variable roughly one-third of individual forecasters are more accurate than a consensus. However, each individual does relatively poorly for some variable while the consensus, in contrast, necessarily never fails relative to most individuals. These results, like most previous studies, describe consensus measures that are synthetic constructs derived from a pre-existing set of individual forecasts. Strictly speaking, this contemporaneous consensus is not available to individual forecasters when their forecasts are made. A prior consensus measure, which is in their information sets, was relatively much less accurate than the contemporaneous measure. Nevertheless, a small subset of individual forecasters were generally inferior to the known, prior consensus forecast.     

Bananas and petrol: further evidence on the forecasting accuracy of the ABS ‘headline’ and ‘underlying’ rates of inflation

In the light of the still topical nature of ‘bananas and petrol’ being blamed for driving much of the inflationary pressures in Australia in recent times, the ‘headline’ and ‘underlying’ rates of inflation are scrutinised in terms of forecasting accuracy. A general structural time‐series modelling strategy is applied to estimate models for alternative types of Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures. From this, out‐of‐sample forecasts are generated from the various models. The underlying forecasts are subsequently adjusted to facilitate comparison. The Ashley, Granger and Schmalensee (1980) test is then performed to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference between the root mean square errors of the models. The results lend weight to the recent findings of Song (2005) that forecasting models using underlying rates are not systematically inferior to those based on the headline rate. In fact, strong evidence is found that underlying measures produce superior forecasts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.