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Author: Marco Formisano
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-04-19
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 1107169437
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the relationship between theory and practice in ancient Greek and Roman scientific and technical texts.
Author: Monika Amsler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2023-04-03
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 3111010317
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSocial Studies of the sciences have long analyzed and exposed the constructed nature of knowledge. Pioneering studies of knowledge production in laboratories (e.g., Latour/Woolgar 1979; Knorr-Cetina 1981) have identified factors that affect processes that lead to the generation of scientific data and their subsequent interpretation, such as money, training and curriculum, location and infrastructure, biography-based knowledge and talent, and chance. More recent theories of knowledge construction have further identified different forms of knowledge, such as tacit, intuitive, explicit, personal, and social knowledge. These theoretical frameworks and critical terms can help reveal and clarify the processes that led to ancient data gathering, information and knowledge production. The contributors use late-antique hermeneutical associations as means to explore intuitive or even tacit knowledge; they appreciate mistakes as a platform to study the value of personal knowledge and its premises; they think about rows and tables, letter exchanges, and schools as platforms of distributed cognition; they consider walls as venues for social knowledge production; and rethink the value of social knowledge in scholarly genealogies--then and now.
Author: Jason König
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-01-20
Total Pages: 871
ISBN-13: 1316849066
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow did ancient scientific and knowledge-ordering writers make their work authoritative? This book answers that question for a wide range of ancient disciplines, from mathematics, medicine, architecture and agriculture, through to law, historiography and philosophy - focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the literature of the Roman Empire. It draws attention to habits that these different fields had in common, while also showing how individual texts and authors manipulated standard techniques of self-authorisation in distinctive ways. It stresses the importance of competitive and assertive styles of self-presentation, and also examines some of the pressures that pulled in the opposite direction by looking at authors who chose to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge or resisted close identification with narrow versions of expert identity. A final chapter by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd offers a comparative account of scientific authority and expertise in ancient Chinese, Indian and Mesopotamian culture.
Author: Claire Bubb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-06
Total Pages: 364
ISBN-13: 0192898612
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat happens when we juxtapose medicine and law in the ancient Roman world? This innovative collection of scholarly research shows how both fields were shaped by the particular needs and desires of their practitioners and users. It approaches the study of these fields through three avenues. First, it argues that the literatures produced by elite practitioners, like Galen or Ulpian, were not merely utilitarian, but were pieces of aesthetically inflected literature and thus carried all of the disparate baggage linked to any form of literature in the Roman context. Second, it suggests that while one element of that literary luggage was the socio-political competition that these texts facilitated, high stakes agonism also uniquely marked the quotidian practice of both medicine and law, resulting in both fields coming to function as forms of popular public entertainment. Finally, it shows how the effects of rhetoric and the deeply rhetorical education of the elite made themselves constantly apparent in both the literature on and the practice of medicine and law. Through case studies in both fields and on each of these topics, together with contextualizing essays, Medicine and the Law Under the Roman Empire suggests that the blanket results of all this were profound. The introduction to the volume argues that medicine was not contrived merely to ensure healing of the infirm by doctors, and law did not single-mindedly aim to regulate society in a consistent, orderly, and binding fashion. Instead, both fields, in the full range of their manifestations, were nested in a complex matrix of social, political, and intellectual crosscurrents, all of which served to shape the very substances of these fields themselves. This poses forward-looking questions: What things might ancient Roman medicine and law have been meant or geared to accomplish in their world? And how might the very substance of Roman medicine and law have been crafted with an eye to fulfilling those peculiarly ancient needs and desires? This book suggests that both fields, in their ancient manifestations, differed fundamentally from their modern counterparts, and must be approached with this fact firmly in mind.
Author: Maria Gerolemou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2023-06-30
Total Pages: 347
ISBN-13: 1009092790
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis innovative and wide-ranging volume is the first systematic exploration of the multifaceted relationship between human bodies and machines in classical antiquity. It examines the conception of the body and bodily processes in mechanical terms in ancient medical writings, and looks into how artificial bodies and automata were equally configured in human terms; it also investigates how this knowledge applied to the treatment of the disabled and the diseased in the ancient world. The volume examines the pre-history of what develops, at a later stage, and more specifically during the early modern period, into the full science of iatromechanics in the context of which the human body was treated as a machine and medical treatments were devised accordingly. The volume facilitates future dialogue between scholars working on different areas, from classics, history and archaeology to history of science, philosophy and technology.
Author: Scott McGill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2018-07-27
Total Pages: 670
ISBN-13: 1118830350
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNoted scholars in the field explore the rich variety of late antique literature With contributions from leading scholars in the field, A Companion to Late Antique Literature presents a broad review of late antique literature. The late antique period encompasses a significant transitional era in literary history from the mid-third century to the early seventh century. The Companion covers notable Greek and Latin texts of the period and provides a varied overview of literature written in six other late antique languages. Comprehensive in scope, this important volume presents new research, methodologies, and significant debates in the field. The Companion explores the histories, forms, features, audiences, and uses of the literature of the period. This authoritative text: Provides an inclusive overview of late antique literature Offers the widest survey to date of the literary traditions and forms of the period, including those in several languages other than Greek and Latin Presents the most current research and new methodologies in the field Contains contributions from an international group of contributors Written for students and scholars of late antiquity, this comprehensive volume provides an authoritative review of the literature from the era.
Author: George Kazantzidis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2019-08-05
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13: 3110661772
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe present volume offers a systematic discussion of the complex relationship between medicine and paradoxography in the ancient world. For a long time, the relationship between the two has been assumed to be virtually non-existent. Paradoxography is concerned with disclosing a world full of marvels and wondrous occurrences without providing an answer as to how these phenomena can be explained. Its main aim is to astonish and leave its readers bewildered and confused. By contrast, medicine is committed to the rational explanation of human phusis, which makes it, in a number of significant ways, incompatible with thauma. This volume moves beyond the binary opposition between ‘rational’ and ‘non-rational’ modes of thinking, by focusing on instances in which the paradox is construed with direct reference to established medical sources and beliefs or, inversely, on cases in which medical discourse allows space for wonder and admiration. Its aim is to show that thauma, rather than present a barrier, functions as a concept which effectively allows for the dialogue between medicine and paradoxography in the ancient world.
Author: Liba Taub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-01-30
Total Pages: 359
ISBN-13: 1107092485
DOWNLOAD EBOOKProvides a broad framework for engaging with ideas relevant to ancient Greek and Roman science, medicine and technology.
Author: K. Sara Myers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2024
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 0197773206
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Beginning with Cicero and Varro and ending with Statius and Pliny the Younger, this chapter offers a chronological investigation of the ways in which real and literary gardens developed from the first century BCE to the first century CE as a means of elite masculine self-representation and the reactions of elite Roman men to the increased social and cultural power of villa and horti estates and their grounds. Gardens served as powerful symbols of wealth and as creative displays of the cultural aspirations of their owners in ways that challenged traditional definitions of gardens and of Roman manliness. Since these large-scale 'gardens' are primarily associated with leisure (otium), authors are concerned with describing and justifying their activities in these sites as befitting Roman masculine ideals. We can trace a change in attitude towards leisure and the private display of wealth, and consequently gardens, largely attributed to changes in the socio-political circumstances of the Roman elite, in the works of Statius and his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who use laudatory descriptions of extensive villas and grounds as a means of expressing social and literary power"--
Author: Diego De Brasi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2022-10-03
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 3110796856
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBiological literature of the Roman imperial period remains somehow ‘underestimated’. It is even quite difficult to speak of biological literature for this period at all: biology (apart from medicine) did not represent, indeed, a specific ‘subgenre’ of scientific literature. Nevertheless, writings as disparate as Philo of Alexandria’s Alexander, Plutarch’s De sollertia animalium or Bruta ratione uti, Aelian’s De Natura Animalium, Oppian’s Halieutika, Pseudo-Oppian’s Kynegetika, and Basil of Caeserea’s Homilies on the Creation engage with zoological, anatomic, or botanical questions. Poikile Physis examines how such writings appropriate, adapt, classify, re-elaborate and present biological knowledge which originated within the previous, mainly Aristotelian, tradition. It offers a holistic approach to these works by considering their reception of scientific material, their literary as well as rhetorical aspects, and their interaction with different socio-cultural conditions. The result of an interdisciplinary discussion among scholars of Greek studies, philosophy and history of science, the volume provides an initial analysis of forms and functions of biological literature in the imperial period.
