[OPE-L] A World Ruled by Number

[Alejandro Valle Baeza <valle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rakesh Bhandari wrote:

Hi Rakesh, I agree with you totally.  Not In Our Genes, in my view,  is a book quite important and essential for any Marxian scholar. What is your dissertation about?

It was a critique of the Bell Curve, though I tried to show to what extent many of its critics

shared in some of its dubious assumptions and to what extent its gloomy ideology was the way (as

Mattick suggested) in which bourgeois society comes to some self understanding of its actual (non harmonic) nature.

Have you papers (from you) on the relationship between social sciences and "natural" sciences?

Yes I sent you offlist my paper on Darwin; I argue that the formative influence of Malthus'

population  dynamics on Darwin's theory has been exaggerated.

I am a bit skeptical of Dickens' important argument that class inequality is manifesting itself in and reproducing itself through biological inequality. I think here of Jerome Kagan's skepticism about the determining importance of prenatal and perinatal experience.

By the way, people will probably be interested in Margaret Schabas' Natural Origins of Economics.

I haven't read it yet, but it seems to be part of the attempt to embed economics in the natural

world. Isn't this what Paul Seabright is trying to do as well?

Yours truly, Rakesh

Yours
Alejandro

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Rakesh, after reading your post I found this:

	m a r g a r e t    s c h a b a s Professor and Head of Philosophy University of British Columbia
			Contact Info
			Buchanan E366 1866 East Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1 Canada Tel: (604) 822-2820 Email Me
	Curriculum Vitae
	Margaret Schabas was appointed to UBC as Professor of Philosophy in 2001. Since July 2004 she has served as the Head of the Philosophy Department. She has held professoriate positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (four years) and at York University (ten years), and has also taught as a visiting professor at Michigan State University, University of Colorado-Boulder, Harvard, CalTech and the Sorbonne. As the recipient of several fellowships, she has enjoyed visiting terms at Stanford, Duke, MIT and Cambridge University. She has published over thirty articles in science studies, the majority of which address topics in the history and philosophy of economics. A number of these articles examine economics as it drew upon or impinged upon other disciplines, notably mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics. Some of the journals in which her articles can be found are Isis, History of Political Economy, and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. Her first book, A World Ruled by Number (Princeton 1990) examined the emergence of mathematical economics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her most recent book, Oeconomies in the Age of Newton (co-edited with Neil De Marchi, Duke 2003), contains a number of articles that show the rich array of linkages between the history of economics and the history of natural philosophy in the early modern period. She has two forthcoming books, Nature in Classical Economics (Chicago 2005), and Essays on Hume’s Political Economy (co-edited with Carl Wennerlind, Routledge 2005). In addition to her doctorate in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (Toronto 1983), she holds a first degree in Music (oboe) and the Philosophy of Science (Indiana 1976), a Master’s degree in the History and Philosophy of Science (Indiana 1977), and a Master’s degree in Economics (Michigan 1985). For the near future she will pursue research on David Hume’s political economy.

Thank you for this reference.
Cordialmente
Alejandro

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