Post by timjohnson on Jul 20, 2011 11:24:16 GMT
One question that sticks in my mind on reading God's Philosophers is why did James Hannam, who has worked in finance, not discuss the importance of the twelfth century financial revolution in the emergence of western science?
Joel Kaye www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521572767 and Alfred Crosby www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item1159619/?site_locale=en_GB have both (relatively) recently written on this.
In a nutshell, Kaye's thesis is that innovations in finance led to the development of vernacular mathematics encapsulated in Fibonacci's Liber Abaci and disseminated through abbaco schools. University based scholars, notably Albert the Great and Aquinas, then began to try and make sense of what was actually happening and tried to identify the essence of the markets using Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and emerging Catholic doctrine. This fusion was exemplified by the Merton Calculators.
Associated with this, and with reference to Hannam's comment on p 228 of God's Philosophers, "We can see how little effect religious affiliation had on science" (accepting the case given), it is intriguing to note that all the pioneers of mathematical probability in the seventeenth century (Pascal, Huygens, Bernoullis, Montmort, de Moivre) were Augustinians, whether Calvinists, Jansenisists, or in Montmort case orthodox Augustinians. Why is this interesting - because just as Descartes "fixed" "absolute" space, Newton "absolute" time, was it only Augustinians who could "fix" "absolute" chance. Newton and Leibnitz, the two other great mathematicians of the time along with Huygens and J. Bernoulli, were not Augustinians and did little work in probability.
magic-maths-money.blogspot.com/
Joel Kaye www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521572767 and Alfred Crosby www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item1159619/?site_locale=en_GB have both (relatively) recently written on this.
In a nutshell, Kaye's thesis is that innovations in finance led to the development of vernacular mathematics encapsulated in Fibonacci's Liber Abaci and disseminated through abbaco schools. University based scholars, notably Albert the Great and Aquinas, then began to try and make sense of what was actually happening and tried to identify the essence of the markets using Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and emerging Catholic doctrine. This fusion was exemplified by the Merton Calculators.
Associated with this, and with reference to Hannam's comment on p 228 of God's Philosophers, "We can see how little effect religious affiliation had on science" (accepting the case given), it is intriguing to note that all the pioneers of mathematical probability in the seventeenth century (Pascal, Huygens, Bernoullis, Montmort, de Moivre) were Augustinians, whether Calvinists, Jansenisists, or in Montmort case orthodox Augustinians. Why is this interesting - because just as Descartes "fixed" "absolute" space, Newton "absolute" time, was it only Augustinians who could "fix" "absolute" chance. Newton and Leibnitz, the two other great mathematicians of the time along with Huygens and J. Bernoulli, were not Augustinians and did little work in probability.
magic-maths-money.blogspot.com/