About this course
Money plays an essential role in our lives. Many of our everyday activities are driven by money, whether we are occupied with earning, spending, saving, or repaying. Often the way we perceive and engage with the world is molded by money, as we tend to measure and balance not only things, but also our relations to other people, time, nature, and even ourselves, in terms of money. While money seems to make the world go around, we rarely ever ask ourselves the question: What is money? Where does money come from?
This course aims to explore these obvious, but nevertheless often neglected questions. Drawing on interdisciplinary resources, the course will use philosophy to investigate how money is related to themes like religion, politics, morality, nature, and care. Focusing on key concepts such as debt, gift, trust, power, and commodity, we will discuss classical philosophical texts by Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Locke, Smith, Marx, and Nietzsche, relating them to present-day issues concerning student-debt, care-economy and eco-capitalism.
Syllabus
Faculty
Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen
FacultyPh.D., Philosophy and European Studies (London School of Economics and Political Science, 2018). Postdoc at Aarhus University, 2021-2024. Postdoc at University of Copenhagen, 2024-. With DIS since 2024.