Paper short abstract:

Taking philosophical and anthropological explorations of contemporary financial markets as subject matter, it is argued that anthropology is an empirical philosophy as capable of giving a philosophical account of these practices as any other form of philosophical enquiry.

Paper long abstract:

Recent ontological and ethical turns in anthropology follow the discipline's concern with epistemology, language, and rhetoric in the 1980s and 1990s, and politics has long been a central subject of anthropological enquiry. Is there anything left in the Euro-American philosophical tradition, of which anthropology is in any case an offshoot, that has been left unexamined by anthropologists? Are anthropology and its signature assemblage of methods, description, and analysis - ethnography - best described as 'empirical philosophy', to use Anne-Marie Mol and Michael Fischer's term? What does such a claim imply that the task of (non-empirical) philosophy might be? One way into these questions goes through the anthropological study of finance. An options trader turned philosopher, Elie Ayache, argues that while the social studies of finance offer important insights beyond the analysis provided by financial economics, only philosophy can attain the level of abstraction necessary to explore the truth of derivatives markets. Drawing on my own experiences as participant-observer in and of financial markets, I argue that this kind of claim obscures the empirical foundations of such philosophy and underplays the capacity of anthropology and other participant-observation based social science accounts to examine the truth of particular events, practices, and relationships. Anthropology - containing people, but also things, numbers, and techniques - should not be shy of ambition. It is as capable as philosophy itself of generating rigorous, empirically grounded philosophical insight with regard to finance, or any other contemporary practice.