James R. Barker Assoc. Professor of Contemporary Civilization

Chair, Contemporary Civilization

history of science, technology, philosophy

history of science at Columbia

 

Projects

Data Mining: The Critique of Artificial Reason, 1963-2005

with the support of the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations

The Matter of Calculation: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage

with the support of the National Science Foundation

The Genealogy of Frivolity: Mathematical Formalism and its Discontents in the European Enlightenment

with the support of the Defining Wisdom Project

Working Papers

From Sociability to Vis-Viva: Emilie Du Châtelet on Social and Natural Order

Sovereignty, Genealogy, History: The Technical and Decorous in Leibniz's Courtly Work

Publications

Essay review of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, (2007), Metascience (forthcoming)

“Philosophy, Space, and Mathematics,” in Aaron Garrett, ed.Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

“Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property,” Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin, eds., Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (Palgrave-MacMillan, forthcoming)

"Matters of Fact [Essay review of Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange (Yale 2007)]" Modern Intellectual History 7,3 (2010): 629-642.

The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

“Three Errors about Indifference: Pascal on the Vacuum, Sociability and Moral Freedom,” Romance Quarterly 50(2003):99-120.

“Writing and Sentiment: Blaise Pascal, the Vacuum and the Pensées,”  Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 32(2001):139-181.

“Descartes' Geometry as Spiritual Exercise,” Critical Inquiry, 28(2001): 40-71; reprinted in Bill Brown, ed. Things. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 40-71.

 

Courses

Summer 2012

History of Computing from (Blaise) Pascal to the Internet

Spring 2012

The Scientific Revolution in Western Europe, 1500-1750

Fall 2011

Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West

2010-11

History of Computing from (Blaise) Pascal to the Internet

Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West

Methods in History of Science (with Marwa Elshakry)

Foucault for Historians (with Samuel Moyn)

Past Courses

Lecture

The European Renaissance, 1400-1600: an introduction

Seminar

Science Across Cultures [Global Core]

Civilizing Processes, 1500-1750

Subjects and Objects of Renaissance Knowledge

Graduate

Introduction to Historical Interpretation and Methods

Topics in Early Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History: Institutions of Knowledge and Belief

Office Hours

Wednesday, 3-5

Address

Department of History

Columbia University

514 Fayerweather Hall

1180 Amsterdam Ave.

MC2513

New York, NY 10027

Email

 

 

 

 

Leibniz, 7.1677 transport mechanism for calculating machine