Quantum Economic Philosophy
Huilin Zhao
Quantum Economic Philosophy takes the quantumlike features inherent in human cognition as its starting point, reconstructing economic philosophy to rethink and transcend the mechanistic worldview that has long dominated economic thought. It reworks the ontological, epistemological and methodological underpinnings of economics through quantum logic, breaking away from the constraints of classical substance ontology. Within this new framework, economic agents are no longer isolated, selfcontained atomic individuals but relational nodes embedded within networks; economic states are not predetermined objective facts waiting passively to be documented, but a set of coexisting, superposed potentialities. Economic observation is not a detached, neutral act of recording; rather, observation, together with the observer’s expectations and actions, actively participates in shaping the economic reality under investigation. Adopting a practical ontology, this book reinterprets core categories including value, capital, markets and economic justice. It unpacks the implicit metaphysical presuppositions embedded within mainstream economics, and clarifies that the quantum turn is not merely rhetorical borrowing from quantum physics. Instead, it constitutes a fundamental paradigm shift suited to the endogenous reflexivity, uncertainty and generative character of economic systems. Balancing rigorous philosophical inquiry with theoretical extensibility for economics, this volume is written for students, researchers and thinkers working in economics, economic philosophy and social theory. It strips away the a priori assumptions built into the conventional equilibrium paradigm, lays a coherent and unified conceptual foundation for the entire quantum economics book series, and furnishes a fresh philosophical vocabulary for re-examining economic order, human choice and institutional evolution.
•Oct 23, 2026•0 citations