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STS.002

Finance and Society

3-0-9 units. HASS-S; CI-H · Undergraduate

Examines finance as a social technology intended to improve economic opportunity by moving capital to where it is most needed. Surveys the history of modern finance, from medieval Italy to the Great Depression, while addressing credit, finance and state (and imperial) power, global financial interconnection, and financial crises. Explores modern finance (since about 1950) from a variety of historical and social-scientific perspectives, covering quant finance, financialization, the crisis of 2007-2008, and finance in the digital age. Enrollment limited.

Spring 2016

Topics

  • Introduction: Studying Finance as a Social Technology
  • Italian Innovations: Late Medieval and Renaissance Technologies of Finance
  • Credit and Credibility in Britain’s “Financial Revolution”
  • Financing a New Nation: The U.S. “Financial Revolution” of the 1790s
  • Making Money in 19 th Century America
  • Pricing the Future: Chicago and the Commodities Trade, 1850-1900
  • Before Black Tuesday: Marginal Investments and the Roaring Twenties
  • Random Walks and Wall Street: A New Mathematics of Finance
  • “Greed Is Good?”: Finance Takes Over in the ’80s
  • (In)Securitization: Financial Engineering and the Great Crash of 2008
  • High-Frequency Trading and the Materiality of Finance in a Digital Age
  • Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Finance, Innovation, and Philanthropy
  • Finance and the Limits of the Technological

Readings

Fall 2003 · Toward the Scientific Revolution

Topics

  • Introductory Lecture
  • “What is Science?”
  • The Presocratics
  • Plato’s World
  • Aristotle’s Physics
  • Aristotle and Hippocrates on Biology and Medicine
  • Ptolemy and Euclid
  • Galen and Alexandrian Engineers
  • Arabic Science
  • Medieval European Universities
  • Medieval Technology
  • No lecture
  • Patronage, Alchemy, and Humanism
  • Vesalius and Anatomy
  • The Copernican Revolution
  • Tycho Brahe and the New Astronomy
  • Kepler: Mysticism and Mars
  • Interpreting Scripture and the Heavens
  • Galileo’s Physics
  • Bacon and the Culture of Collecting
  • Descartes’s Mechanical Philosophy
  • Newton’s Dynamics and Gravitation
  • Newton’s Optics and the Culture of Newtonianism
  • England’s Royal Society

Readings

  • A List of Informal Suggestions*
    Listed reading
  • History courses use different kinds of materials that demand different kinds of reading. For instance, a narrative of someone’s life will probably be quicker and easier to read than a historian’s analysis of an event and its reasons. A collection of primary documents will make you ask different questions than will a textbook account.
    Listed reading
  • Feyerabend, Paul. “‘Science’: The Myth and its Role in Society.” Inquiry 18 (1975): 167-81.
    Listed reading
  • Collins, Harry, and Trevor Pinch. The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 91-107.
    Listed reading
  • Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 88-91.
    Listed reading
  • Frankfort, Henri. “Explanations of Natural Phenomena in the Ancient Near East.” In Science & Culture in the Western Tradition. Edited by John G. Burke. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 6-7.
    Listed reading
  • Lindberg, David. The Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 1-34.
    Listed reading
  • Plato. “The Allegory of the Cave.” In Science & Culture in the Western Tradition. Edited by John G. Burke. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 7-9.
    Listed reading
  • Plato. Timaeus. Selections from Timaeus and Critias. Translated by Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 1965, pp. 40-6, 66-8, 70-1, 73-9.
    Listed reading
  • Lloyd, G. E. R. Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971, pp. 66-79.
    Listed reading
  • Hetherington, Norriss S. “Plato’s Cosmology.” In Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives. Edited by Norriss Hetherington. New York: Garland, 1993, pp. 79-81.
    Listed reading
  • Lindberg. The Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 35-45.
    Listed reading
  • Aristotle. Physics. Translated by R. P. Hardie, and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, Book II, pp. 329-34; Book III, pp. 342-5.
    Listed reading
  • ———. On the Heavens. Reprinted in Theories of the Universe: From Babylonian Myth to Modern Science. Edited by Milton K. Munitz. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1957, pp. 89-92, 97-100.
    Listed reading
  • Hetherington, Norriss S. “Aristotle’s Cosmology.” In Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives. Edited by Norriss Hetherington. New York: Garland, 1993, pp. 95-103.
    Listed reading
  • Lloyd, G. E. R. “Greek Science and Society.” In Science & Culture in the Western Tradition. Edited by John G. Burke. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 17-19.
    Listed reading
  • Lindberg. The Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 47-62.
    Listed reading
  • Aristotle. “Parts of Animals,” and “On the Generation of Animals.” In The New Aristotle Reader. Edited by J. L. Ackrill. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 220-32, 241-50.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “Problems Connected with the Drinking of Wine and Drunkenness,” “Problems Connected with Sexual Intercourse,” and “Problems Connected with Fatigue.” In The Works of Aristotle. Vol. 7. Series edited by W. D. Ross. Problemata. Edited by E. S. Forster. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927, pp. 871-85.
    Listed reading
  • Hippocrates. “The Oath.” In Hippocratic Writings. Edited by G. E. R. Lloyd. Translated by J. Chadwick, et al. New York: Penguin Classics, 1978, p. 67.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “On the Sacred Disease.” In Science & Culture in the Western Tradition. Edited by John G. Burke. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 12-13.
    Listed reading
  • Lloyd, G. E. R. Science, Folklore, and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999, pp. 58-61.
    Listed reading
  • Lindberg. The Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 62-8, 111-25.
    Listed reading
  • Ptolemy. The Almagest. Translated by R. C. Taliaferro, in Great Books of the Western World. Vol. 16. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins. Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1938, pp. 5-14, 86-93.
    Listed reading
  • Euclid. The Elements. In Euclid’s Elements of Geometry , by Robert Potts. London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1877, pp. 1-7.
    Listed reading
  • Evans, James. “Ptolemy.” In Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives. Edited by Norriss Hetherington. New York: Garland, 1993, pp. 122-30.
    Listed reading
  • Heilbron, John. Geometry Civilized: History, Culture, and Technique. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 241-5.
    Listed reading
  • Lindberg. The Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 85-105.
    Listed reading
  • Galen. On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato. Edited and translated by Phillip de Lacy. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978, Book II, pp. 65-71, 104-29.
    Listed reading
  • Cohen, Morris R., and I. E. Drabkin, eds. “On the Construction of Artillery: Application of Empirical Formulae.” In A Source Book in Greek Science. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948, pp. 318-26.
    Listed reading
  • Brumbaugh, Robert S. Ancient Greek Gadgets and Machines. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966, pp. 75-91.
    Listed reading
  • Farrington, Benjamin. “Greek Philosophy and Technology.” In Science & Culture in the Western Tradition. Edited by John G. Burke. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 16-17.
    Listed reading
  • Lindberg. The Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 125-31.
    Listed reading
  • al-Din Al-Tusi, Nasir. Memoir on Astronomy. Vol. 1. Translated by F. J. Ragep. New York: Springer, 1993, pp. 194-204, 212-4, 222 (even-numbered pages only).
    Listed reading
  • Kennedy, E. S. “Late Medieval Planetary Theory.” Isis 57 (1966): 365-78.
    Listed reading
  • Sabra, A. I. “The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement.” History of Science 25 (1987): 223-43.
    Listed reading
  • Lindberg. The Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 161-82.
    Listed reading
  • “The Condemnation of 1277,” and “Typical Scientific Questions Based on Aristotle’s Major Physical Treatises.” In A Source Book in Medieval Science. Edited by Edward Grant. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974, pp. 45-50, 199-205.
    Listed reading
  • Grant, Edward. The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 70-85.
    Listed reading
  • Ben-David, Joseph. “The Emergence of the Professional University Teacher in the Medieval University.” In Science and Culture in the Western Tradition. Edited by John G. Burke. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 37-41.
    Listed reading
  • Lindberg. The Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 183-213.
    Listed reading
  • Gimpel, Jean. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. New York: Gower, 1988, pp. 147-70.
    Listed reading
  • White, Lynn, Jr. “Technology in the Middle Ages.” In Technology in Western Civilization. Vol. 1. Edited by Melvin Kranzberg, and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 66-79.
    Listed reading
  • Burke, John G. ed. Science & Culture in the Western Tradition. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 51-57, 72-77, 85-7.
    Listed reading
  • Grafton, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 28-35, 148-53, 156-7.
    Listed reading
  • Vesalius, Andreas. The Epitome of Andreas Vesalius. Translated by L. R. Lind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969, pp. xxxi-xxxvi.
    Listed reading
  • Selected plates from The Illustrations from the Work of Vesalius. Translated and edited by J. B. de C. M. Saunders, and Charles O’Malley. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1950, pp. 42-5, 92-3, 100-1, 104-5.
    Listed reading
  • Vesalius, Andreas. On the Fabric of the Human Body, Book 1. Translated and edited by W. F. Richardson, and J. B. Carman. San Francisco: Norman, 1998, pp. 45-9, 385-97.
    Listed reading
  • Ferrari, Giovanna. “Public anatomy lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna.” Past and Present 117 (November 1987): 50-106.
    Listed reading
  • Copernicus, Nicolas. On the Revolutions of the Heavens. Translated by Edward Rosen. Edited by Jerzy Dobrzycki. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, pp. xv-xvii, 3-11, 18-22, 244-7.
    Listed reading
  • Lerner, Michel-Pierre, and Jean-Pierre Verdet. “Copernicus.” In Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives. Edited by Norriss Hetherington. Translated by James Evans, New York: Garland, 1993, pp. 147-73.
    Listed reading
  • Brahe, Tycho. “Reform of Copernicus and Ptolemy.” In Science & Culture in the Western Tradition. Edited by John G. Burke. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 99-102.
    Listed reading
  • Hannaway, Owen. “Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe.” Isis 77 (1986): 585-610.
    Listed reading
  • Kepler, Johannes. Mysterium Cosmographicum. Translated by A. M. Duncan. New York: Arabis, 1981, pp. 62-73.
    Listed reading
  • Donahue, W. H. “Kepler.” In Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives. Edited by Norriss Hetherington. New York: Garland, 1993, pp. 239-62.
    Listed reading
  • Westman, Robert S. “The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century.” In Science & Culture in the Western Tradition. Edited by John G. Burke. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 80-4.
    Listed reading
  • Galilei, Galileo. Sidereus Nuncius: or The Sidereal Messenger. Translated by Albert van Helden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 29-41, 64-5.
    Listed reading
  • ———. Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican. Translated by Stillman Drake. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 1-7, 339-56.
    Listed reading
  • “Sentence (22 June 1633),” and “Galileo’s Abjuration (22 June 1633).” In The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. Edited and translated by Maurice A. Finocchiaro. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 286-93.
    Listed reading
  • Heilbron, John. The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 3-5, 16-21.
    Listed reading
  • Galilei, Galileo. Discourses on Two New Sciences. Translated by Henry Crew, and Alfonso de Salvio. New York: Macmillan, 1914, pp. 42-4, 153-5, 214-8, 244-5, 262-7.
    Listed reading
  • Westfall, Robert S. The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 3-24.
    Listed reading
  • Bacon, Francis. New Atlantis. Edited by Jerry Weinberger. Revised ed. Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1989, pp. 36-83.
    Listed reading
  • ———. The New Organon , in The New Organon and Related Writings. Edited by Fulton H. Anderson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960, pp. 39-62.
    Listed reading
  • Grafton, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 197-209, 212-3, 216-29, 232-7.
    Listed reading
  • Descartes, René. “Rules for the Direction of the Mind.” In Science & Culture in the Western Tradition. Edited by John G. Burke. Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1987, pp. 126-7.
    Listed reading
  • ———. Discourse on Method, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Vol. 1. Translated by Elizabeth Haldane, and G. R. T. Ross. New York: Cambridge Universe Press, 1978, pp. 80-106.
    Listed reading
  • Westfall, Richard S. “The Mechanical Philosophy.” In The Construction of Modern Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 25-42.
    Listed reading
  • Note: All readings for this week are from Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen, and Richard S. Westfall. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
    Listed reading
  • Newton, Isaac. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy , in Newton , pp. 227-38, 339-42.
    Listed reading
  • Newton, Issac. Opticks , in Newton, pp. 115-9.
    Listed reading
  • SES #: 24 · TOPICS: England’s Royal Society · READINGS: Shapin, Steven. “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England.” Isis 79 (1988): 373-404.
    Reading assignment
  • Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN: 0226482057.
    Listed reading
  • Cohen, I. Bernard, and Richard S. Westfall, eds. Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. ISBN: 0393959023.
    Listed reading

Prerequisites & course information

Prereq: None U (Fall) 3-0-9 units. HASS-S; CI-H

Sources