Texts, Textual Acts and the History of Science

Texts, Textual Acts and the History of Science
Author: Karine Chemla
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319164449

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The book relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory.

Pieces and Parts in Scientific Texts

Pieces and Parts in Scientific Texts
Author: Florence Bretelle-Establet
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319784676

This book starts from a first general observation: there are very diverse ways to frame and convey scientific knowledge in texts. It then analyzes texts on mathematics, astronomy, medicine and life sciences, produced in various parts of the globe and in different time periods, and examines the reasons behind the segmentation of texts and the consequences of such textual divisions. How can historians and philosophers of science approach this diversity, and what is at stake in dealing with it? The book addresses these questions, adopting a specific approach to do so. In order to shed light on the diversity of organizational patterns and rhetorical strategies in scientific texts, and to question the rationale behind the choices made to present such texts in one particular way, it focuses on the issue of text segmentation, offering answers to questions such as: What was the meaning of segmenting texts into paragraphs, chapters, sections and clusters? Was segmentation used to delimit self-contained units, or to mark breaks in the physical appearance of a text in order to aid reading and memorizing, or to cope with the constraints of the material supports? How, in these different settings and in different texts, were pieces and parts made visible?

The Frontiers of Ancient Science

The Frontiers of Ancient Science
Author: Brooke Holmes
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 718
Release: 2015-03-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110389304

Our understanding of science, mathematics, and medicine today can be deeply enriched by studying the historical roots of these areas of inquiry in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. The fields of ancient science and mathematics have in recent years witnessed remarkable growth. The present volume brings together contributions from more than thirty of the most important scholars working in these fields in the United States and Europe in honor of the eminent historian of ancient science and medicine Heinrich von Staden, Professor Emeritus of Classics and History of Science at the Institute of Advanced Study and William Lampson Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at Yale University. The papers range widely from Mesopotamia to Ancient Greece and Rome, from the first millennium B.C. to the early medieval period, and from mathematics to philosophy, mechanics to medicine, representing both a wide diversity of national traditions and the cutting edge of the international scholarly community.

Writing the Past

Writing the Past
Author: Gavin Lucas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2018-11-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0429815212

How do archaeologists make knowledge? Debates in the latter half of the twentieth century revolved around broad, abstract philosophies and theories such as positivism and hermeneutics which have all but vanished today. By contrast, in recent years there has been a great deal of attention given to more concrete, practice-based study, such as fieldwork. But where one was too abstract, the other has become too descriptive and commonly evades issues of epistemic judgement. Writing the Past attempts to reintroduce a normative dimension to knowledge practices in archaeology, especially in relation to archaeological practice further down the ‘assembly line’ in the production of published texts, where archaeological knowledge becomes most stabilized and is widely disseminated. By exploring the composition of texts in archaeology and the relation between their structural, performative characteristics and key epistemic virtues, this book aims to move debate in both knowledge and writing practices in a new direction. Although this book will be of particular interest to archaeologists, the argument offered has relevance for all academic disciplines concerned with how knowledge production and textual composition intertwine.

Rules

Rules
Author: Lorraine Daston
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2023-08-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691254087

A panoramic history of rules in the Western world Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don’t, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived. Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change—how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don’t, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines. Rules offers a wide-angle view on the history of the constraints that guide us—whether we know it or not.

Cultures without Culturalism

Cultures without Culturalism
Author: Karine Chemla
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2017-03-23
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822373092

Cultural accounts of scientific ideas and practices have increasingly come to be welcomed as a corrective to previous—and still widely held—theories of scientific knowledge and practices as universal. The editors caution, however, against the temptation to overgeneralize the work of culture, and to lapse into a kind of essentialism that flattens the range and variety of scientific work. The book refers to this tendency as culturalism. The contributors to the volume model a new path where historicized and cultural accounts of scientific practice retain their specificity and complexity without falling into the traps of culturalism. They examine, among other issues, the potential of using notions of culture to study behavior in financial markets; the ideology, organization, and practice of earthquake monitoring and prediction during China's Cultural Revolution; the history of quadratic equations in China; and how studying the "glass ceiling" and employment discrimination became accepted in the social sciences. Demonstrating the need to understand the work of culture as a fluid and dynamic process that directly both shapes and is shaped by scientific practice, Cultures without Culturalism makes an important intervention in science studies. Contributors. Bruno Belhoste, Karine Chemla, Caroline Ehrhardt, Fa-ti Fan,Kenji Ito, Evelyn Fox Keller, Guillaume Lachenal, Donald MacKenzie, Mary S. Morgan, Nancy J. Nersessian, David Rabouin, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Claude Rosental, Koen Vermeir

Ownership of Knowledge

Ownership of Knowledge
Author: Dagmar Schafer
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2023-07-18
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0262545594

A framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society. Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership. Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order. The book presents case studies showing how diverse knowledge economies are created and how inequalities arise from them. Unlike scholars who have fragmented this discourse across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, the editors highlight recent developments in the emerging field of the global history of knowledge—as science, as economy, and as culture. The case studies reveal how notions of knowing and owning emerge because they reciprocally produce and determine each other’s limits and possibilities; that is, how we know inevitably affects how we can own what we know; and how we own always impacts how and what we are able to know. Contributors Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, Cynthia Brokaw, Marius Buning, Viren Murthy, Marjolijn Bol, Amy E. Slaton, James Leach, Myles W. Jackson, Lissant Bolton, Vivek S. Oak, Jörn Oeder

Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History

Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History
Author: Paul R. Goldin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 726
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317681916

The study of early China has been radically transformed over the past fifty years by archaeological discoveries, including both textual and non-textual artefacts. Excavations of settlements and tombs have demonstrated that most people did not lead their lives in accordance with ritual canons, while previously unknown documents have shown that most received histories were written retrospectively by victors and present a correspondingly anachronistic perspective. This handbook provides an authoritative survey of the major periods of Chinese history from the Neolithic era to the fall of the Latter Han Empire and the end of antiquity (AD 220). It is the first volume to include not only a comprehensive review of political history but also detailed treatments of topics that transcend particular historical periods, such as: Warfare and political thought Cities and agriculture Language and art Medicine and mathematics Providing a detailed analysis of the most up-to-date research by leading scholars in the field of early Chinese history, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese history, Asian archaeology, and Chinese studies in general.