Title: Writing science : medical and mathematical authorship in ancient Greece /
Authors: Asper, Markus,; Kanthak, Anna-Maria.
Year: 2013
Subjects: Science Greece History; Mathematics, Greek.; Medicine, Greek and Roman; Medical Writing history; Authorship history; Greek World; Mathematics history; Science history
Abstract: "Scientific and technological texts have not played a significant role in modern literary criticism. This applies to Classics, too, despite the fact that a large part of the field’s extant texts deal with questions of medicine, mathematics, and natural philosophy. Focusing mostly on medical and mathematical texts, this collection [of fifteen essays] aims at approaching ancient Greek science and its texts from the cross-disciplinary perspective of authorship. Among the questions addressed are: What is a scientific author? In what respect does scientific writing differ from ‘literary’ writing? How does the author present himself as an authoritative figure through his text? What strategies of trust do these authors employ? These and related questions cannot be discussed within the typical boundaries of modern academic disciplines, thus most of the sixteen authors, many of them leading experts in the fields of ancient science, bring a comparative perspective to their subjects. As a result, the collection not only offers a new approach to this vast area of ancient literature, thus effectively discovering new possibilities for literary criticism, it also reflects on our current forms of scientific and scholarly written communication."--
Contents: The Name and Nature of Science: Authorship in Social and Evolutionary Context / Paul T. Keyser -- Ancient Writings, Modern Conceptions of Authorship. Reflections on Some Historical Processes That Shaped the Oldest Extant Mathematical Sources from Ancient China / Karine Chemla -- Scholarship and Competitiveness: Pliny the Elder’s Attitude towards His Predecessors in the Naturalis Historia / Thorsten Fögen -- Writing the Animal: Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Galen / Heinrich von Staden -- Galen and the Scientific Treatise: a Case Study of Mixtures / Philip van der Eijk -- Galen on Poetic Testimony / Ralph M. Rosen -- The Violent Scholiast: Power Issues in Ancient Commentaries / Ineke Sluiter -- Authorial Presence in the Ancient Exact Sciences / Reviel Netz -- Accounts, Numeracy and Democracy in Classical Athens / Serafina Cuomo -- Diagrammatic Reasoning: the Foundations of Mechanics / Steffen Bogen -- Three Introductions to Celestial Science in the First Century BC / Alan C. Bowen -- On the Variety of ‘Genres’ of Greek Mathematical Writing: Thinking about Mathematical Texts and Modes of Mathematical Discourse / Liba Taub -- Sing, Muse, of the Hypotenuse: Influences of Poetry and Rhetoric on the Formation of Greek Mathematics / Apostolos Doxiadis and Michalis Sialaros -- Making up Progress – in Ancient Greek Science Writing / Markus Asper -- In Strange Lands: Disembodied Authority and the Role of the Physician in the Hippocratic Corpus and Beyond / Brooke Holmes.