Subjectivity

Hayek opened his Sensory Order by inquiring: “What is mind?”. He could also have given this first chapter the title: “What is subjectivity?” –after all, he was an empiricist.-

Roots

The rules of perception issue belongs to the Hume’s legacy to Hayek – also to Burke’s and Kant’s. In this sense, the Hayekian social theory is closely related to an aesthetical subject.
Nevertheless, the roots of the Hayekian thought are not to be traced back to the major modern philosophy. Despite the different countries he lived in, the waving course of his years, his frantic movements from one field of study to another, Hayek remained loyal to his master’s teaching, the haunting ideas which introduced him to the matters of biology, psychology, and disperse knowledge, those of Ernst Mach.

Rules of Perception

The central issue of the philosophy of F.A. Hayek is the question of the rules of perception, even more important to his work than the most interesting Hayekian problem: the concept of spontaneous order. Once the former has been examined in detail -some kind of critique of judgment-, the latter will become clearer.