Although Adam Smith's 1776 Wealth of Nations is often cited as marking the birth of economics, it was really not until after the second world war that economics became the distinctive, more or less unified, and largely separate discipline summarised in the textbooks of today. Even a mere fifty years ago, it was possible for the intelligent reader to move with relative ease between economics on the one hand and political economy, sociology and social theory, psychology and philosophy on the other. This is now no longer the case, and most young economists are taught to think of their discipline, not primarily in terms of the particular 'economic' social phenomena it was once taken to be about, but as a sophisticated and largely self-contained analytical approach to the investigation of social phenomena of any kind. Even so, economics has never been able to separate itself entirely from its sister disciplines, even at the high tide of mathematical economics and positivism during the 1970s and 1980s, and many of the most active new areas in economics currently involve some form of boundary crossing (e.g. experimental economics, neuroeconomics and computational economics to name just three). With respect to the philosophy of economics in particular, the last fifty years or so have seen a steady expansion in scholarly investigation into different connections between economics and philosophy, with the emergence of new journals, professional associations, research networks and the like. There has been a great deal of work on epistemological questions in the wake of the decline of positivism, on boundary issues and the question of whether or not economics constitutes a science, and on the rhetoric of economics, ethics, value and, latterly, the ontology of economics (Hands, 2001). It is against this background that, in 2004, three of us published the Elgar Companion to Economics and Philosophy (Davis, Marciano and Runde, 2004, henceforth the Companion), an edited collection aimed at documenting the current state of play in three important areas of the philosophy of economics: (1) Political economy as political philosophy; (2) The methodology and epistemology of economics; and (3) Social ontology and the ontology of economics. The various authors represented in the volume were chosen on the basis of their having made distinctive contributions in these general areas, and they were asked, not only to survey the state of the field as they saw it, but also provide statements of their own positions and their perspectives on the field in question and its possible direction of development in the future. Imposed upon them, therefore, was the need both to mine the philosophical subject matter of economics and also to stand back from it to assess it in a manner that would do justice to the complex interrelations that exist between these different points of access as they saw them at the time. In effect, then, the authors were asked to anticipate the volume's appearance and its reviews, and were thus the first voice in the dialogue recorded below. The Companion was subsequently the subject of a session at the meeting of the History of Economics Society, held at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington between 24-27 June 2005, and the present 'review' comprises revised versions of the contributions to that session. The structure of the session followed the structure of the book, with separate commentaries on each of the three sections listed above, from people from a range of different perspectives: Peter Boettke and Chris Coyne (PB&CC, representatives of the Austrian School of economics), Margaret Schabas (MS, a philosopher and historian of economic ideas) and Francesco Guala (FG, a philosopher of science). The commentators were asked to concentrate on general issues that emerged in the papers comprising the section of the book they had responsibility for. Each of the commentaries was then followed by a brief reply from the editor who had principal responsibility for that section in the book, and these responses are also reproduced below.
