EIPE’25 Midterm Lectures: Cartwright, Gustafsson, and Pistor

More information about the speakers

Nancy Cartwright is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego. As co-director of the Centre for Hymanities Engaging Science and Society (CHESS, Durham), she currently specializes on the notion of objectivity and evidence, especially for evidence-based policy. In the first part of her career she has been based at Stanford University where she did ground-breaking work on the role of models, causal inference, and causation in the natural sciences, especially physics; and at the London School of Economics where she specialized in the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, with special attention to economics. Cartwright has published more than ten books between the 1980s and now, ranging from her seminal How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983) to historical work on Otto Neurath and, more recently, a book on how to improve child safety.

Katharina Pistor is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School (Columbia University). Previously she held positions at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Law in Hamburg. Pistor writes, among other things, on corporate governance, money and finance and property rights. She is the author or co-author of nine books. Her most recent book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press), examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collateral law, and trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law. The Code of Capital was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider. In addition, she served as a scientific expert for Congres on issues related to cryptocurrencies.