Ancient and Modern Knowledges (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity
Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity (open access), 2023
Social 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. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111010311/html#overview
Transcript (Mainz Historical Cultural Sciences), 2019
Since the dawn of humanity, people have developed concepts about themselves and the natural world in which they live. This volume aims at investigating the construction and transfer of such concepts between and within various ancient and medieval cultures. The single contributions try to answer questions concerning the sources of knowledge, the strategies of transfer and legitimation as well as the conceptual changes over time and space. After a comprehensive introduction, the volume is divided into three parts: The contributions of the first section treat various theoretical and methodological aspects. Two additional thematic sections deal with a special field of knowledge, i.e. concepts of the moon and of the end of the world in fire.
Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science
Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science, 2015
While the title of this book might give the impression that it is a 700-page tome on a peripheral genre of late 17th-century English literature, the non-specialist readership of Reviews in History ought not to be misled. By 'histories of philosophy' Dmitri Levitin actually means neither simply writings titled as such, nor even simply writings whose content is dominated by such a narrative. His remit, really, is learned propositions made 'virtually everywhere' (p. 30) by the English in the 1640-1700 period about ancient philosophy. And what counts as 'philosophy' here? Apparently any set of universalist statements made by non-Christians in antiquity-'Zoroastrian theology' (p. 33) and Greek medicine, for example. Many readers will wonder whether these specifications result from an attempt strictly to 'examine seventeenth-century histories on their own terms' (p. 8), but they do allow Levitin to capture a wide and important slice of an indubitably central but usually sidelined realm of ideational and scholarly innovation in the later 17th century: the study of the past. Levitin's contribution is to provide an array of subtly analyzed, elaborately contextualized, extensively detailed, and often narrativally interrelated examples of the procedures and frameworks that characterized late humanist historical inquiry. He shows that English scholars used these procedures and frameworks to furnish novel accounts of the history of ancient philosophy in a wide variety of settings, from histories of philosophy proper to biblical criticism, apologetics, accounts of early Christianity, and debates on scientific
The History of Knowledge and the Future of Knowledge Societies
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte / History of Science and Humanities, 2019
The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re‐definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance in making knowledge. These issues have pertinence in the current climate where expertise is increasingly questioned and authority seems to lose its ground. Illustrated with examples from recent historiography of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, we indicate some fruitful new avenues for research in the history of knowledge. Taken together, we hope that they will show that the history of knowledge could build the expertise required by the challenges of twenty‐first century knowledge societies, just like the history of science, throughout its development as a discipline in the twentieth century, responded to the demands posed by science and society.
John Caius and Conrad Gessner were both medical men who practiced philology at a high level. Caius edited Greek medical texts. He became an expert at finding and collating manuscripts. Gessner edited Greek texts of many kinds. He set a new standard for systematic bibliography. Close friends, they collaborated energetically. Gessner stimulated Caius's interest in the relations of languages, and Caius supplied information and illustrations for Gessner's works on natural history. Their case seems to attest the unity of learning in the sixteenth century. Yet Gessner made clear that he saw direct observation, not philological research, as the chief source of knowledge about the natural world. And Caius, when studying animals, fish, and plants, relied on information provided by unlearned men whose empirical knowledge and tacit expertise he trusted. Both saw philology and natural history as different cultures of knowledge, which employed distinct practices-though the two men also held that the same person could inhabit, and shape, both cultures at the same time. Their case suggests that a binary division between forms of research was already emerging in the Renaissance-and that a given individual might toggle between these forms as subject matter demanded.