Montagskolloquium

Global Envirotech Histories. Knowledge and Artifacts in Motion

Organization: Martin Meiske and Fabienne Will in cooperation with Roland Wenzlhuemer

Starts at 4:30 p.m.

Location: Alter Seminarraum, Bibliotheksbau

Zoom conference link: https://zoom.us/j/91255064760?pwd=TlRpeXZPaWVMbGx3Q2tTSi9SU2dZUT09

Zum Kolloquiumsplakat

Colloquium for Ellen Harlizius-Klück

Dr. Ellen Harlizus-Klück is since 2024 as a senior researcher in the Research Institute of the Deusches Museum. Since 2016 she was head of the research group PENELOPE – A Study of Weaving as Technical Mode of Existence, financed by the ERC Consolidator Grant in the HORIZON 2020 programme of the European Research Council.

Location: Alter Seminarraum, Bibliotheksbau

Zoom conference link: https://zoom.us/j/91255064760?pwd=TlRpeXZPaWVMbGx3Q2tTSi9SU2dZUT09

July 15, 4.30 p.m.

Ulf Hashagen
Welcome

Rebecca Wolf
Laudatio

Liba Taub
Vitruvius and the history of science

Coffee Break

Giovanni Fanfani
Math in technê. Weaving, number, and the emergence of Greek arithmetic

Rebecca Wolf: Laudatio

Rebecca Wolf is Director of the State Institute for Music Research. She was previously a guest professor at the University of Regensburg and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and headed the Leibniz Research Group "Materiality of Musical Instruments. New Approaches to a Cultural History of Organology" at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Fellowships have taken her to Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; her first post-doctoral position was at the FU Berlin. Her research focuses on the connection between material culture and music as well as the history of music and acoustics since the late 18th century. She is editor of the series "Klang und Begriff" published by Schott Verlag.

Liba Taub: Vitruvius and the history of science

Liba Taub is a Visiting Scholar of the Forschungsinstitut für Technik- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte of the Deutsches Museum, and Director of Research at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge. She is Professor Emerita of History and Philosophy of Science and was Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum 1995-2022. She is the author of numerous books and articles on Greco-Roman science, most recently Ancient Greek and Roman Science: A Very Short Introduction (2023) and Science Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (2017; Greek trans. 2024), and has edited several notable volumes, including the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Science (2020) and the Cambridge History of Science, vol. 1, on Ancient Science (with Alexander Jones, 2018). She has also published extensively on scientific instruments, and her article ‘What is a scientific instrument, now?’ appeared in a special issue of the Journal of the History of Collections (2019).

Abstract:

In De architectura (9.8.1), Vitruvius (first century BCE) reports that

Berosus the Chaldaean is said to have invented the semicircular dial hollowed out of a square block and cut according to the latitude; Aristarchus of Samos, the Bowl or Hemisphere, as it is said, also the Disk on a level surface; the astronomer Eudoxus, or as some say Apollonius, the Spider; Scopinas of Syracuse, the Plinthium or Ceiling, of which an example is in the Circus Flaminius; Parmenio, the Dial for Consultation; Theodosius and Andrias, the Dial for All Latitudes; Patrocles, the Dovetail; Dionysodorus the Cone; Apollonius, the Quiver. The persons already enumerated and many others left behind them other discoveries, such as the Conical Spider, the Conical Ceiling and the Antiborean. Many also have left instructions for making Hanging Dials for travellers. (Trans. F. Granger, 1934)                                  

Familiarity with Greek science was displayed by some ancient Romans hoping to impress. References to previous achievements had various resonances, including enlisting the auctoritas of the past.

Vitruvius memorialised and celebrated individuals for their mathematical and scientific achievements. In Book 9 he included a list of inventors of different types of sundials, offering brief accounts of time-finding devices, as well as mathematics, astronomy and astrology. Most, if not all, of the achievements he describes were accomplished by Greeks, yet Vitruvius emphasises how the various discoveries and solutions to problems are useful to people more generally.

There are questions about how, in the face of the dynamic Hellenophone intellectual community that surrounded them, Republican Roman writers—such as Cicero and Vitruvius—interpreted, reshaped, and even subverted inherited Greek traditions, developing new ways of thinking and writing about their past in answer to contemporary concerns. In considering the sections of De architectura in which achievements of Greek mathematicians are recounted, I also pose the question: to what extent can Vitruvius be understood as following an earlier (Greek) practice of writing what may be regarded as histories of science?

Giovanni Fanfani: Math in technê. Weaving, number, and the emergence of Greek arithmetic.

GIOVANNI FANFANI is a classical philologist who has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Copenhagen and at the Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science of Deutsches Museum, Munich. His research spans archaic and classical Greek literature, especially lyric poetry and Presocratic philosophy, around the interaction between textile technology and early Greek thought. Ongoing work explores the contribution of ancient weaving to the emergence of Greek mathematics (with Ellen Harlizius-Klück), the soundscape of Pindaric poetry, and Plato’s distinction between pure and applied knowledge. He is co-editor of the volume Homo Textor. Weaving as Technical Mode of Existence (forthcoming for Mattering Press).

Abstract:

Plato takes a decisive step towards theorizing a separation between stable, abstract and universal knowledge (epistêmê) and embodied, productive knowledge (technê) by positing abstract arithmetic (arithmetikê) as a paradigmatic instance of pure science (epistêmê) while recasting the domain of technê (embodied, productive knowledge) as applied science. This talk explores the hypothesis that behind Plato’s distinction there may lurk the contribution which the domain of technê gave to the development of those branches of early Greek mathematics that Plato heralds as forms of pure epistêmê. Indeed, arithmetikê (and the companion discipline of logistikê)is in Plato often coextensive with the theory of odd and even numbers, which retains a peculiar status in the early history of Greek mathematics: apparently too elementary and irrelevant for the complex number theory that is the object of the arithmetical books of Euclid’s Elements, and yet inserted there as a self-contained ‘fossil’ of deductive and axiomatic mathematics of Pythagorean origin, it does not seem to accommodate practical applications either—in the eyes of historians of Greek mathematics, at least. As groundbreaking research by Ellen Harlizius-Klück has argued, however, the ancient technology of weaving generates patterns and instantiates order by a logic that corresponds to the operations described in the theory of odd and even as we find it in Euclid. In other words, number is embedded in weaving as an ordering function: this is remarkably different from the way in which numbers work in other technologies and crafts, and this talk will attempt to situate the function of number in weaving against and within the emergence of Greek arithmetic and its relation with the domain of technê as knowledge.