Sciences, Philosophie, Histoire – UMR 7219, laboratoire SPHERE

Le séminaire sera, au cours de cette année universitaire, pour l’essentiel consacré aux aspects textuels explorés en relation avec le programme de recherche "Mathematical Sciences in the Ancient World" (SAW, ERC Advanced Research Grant).

• Nous y étudierons comment des sources portent la marque des milieux dans lesquels elles ont été produites.
  
• Nous poserons la question de la manière dont les documents attestent des savoirs.
  
• Nous nous intéresserons à l’histoire de l’écriture par compilation.
  
• Nous mènerons des recherches sur l’organisation que les acteurs ont donnée aux savoirs consignés, en nous penchant sur les parties en lesquelles ils ont structuré leurs textes.
  
• Enfin nous aborderons la question de la manière dont les sources reflètent l’environnement matériel dans lequel elles ont été produites.

Responsables : Karine Chemla (CNRS, REHSEIS–SPHERE), avec Agathe Keller, Christine Proust et l’ensemble du groupe HSHT du programme de recherche ERC Mathematical Sciences in the Ancient World (SAW)

PROGRAMME 2014-2015

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Les jeudis, 9:30–17:30, salle précisée ultérieurement. Université Paris Diderot, bâtiment Condorcet, 4, rue Elsa Morante, 75013 Paris – plan d’accès.

juin  !! Reporté en novembre 2015 !!
Rencontre : "On a tomb sealed around 186BCE in China and containing a “math book”", organisée par Karine Chemla et Daniel P. Morgan, avec le groupe SAW.

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jeudi 28 mai , 9:30–17:30, salle Mondrian, 646A

• Isabelle Lémonon (EHESS, Centre Alexandre Koyré)
  La Table alphabétique et analytique de chimie de Mme Dupiery : quels enjeux de savoir ?
  Le système des connaissances chimiques, publié en 1801 par Antoine François Fourcroy en 5 tomes (puis complété par 6 autres tomes) est accompagné par une table alphabétique et analytique des matières, rédigée par Madame Dupiery. L’ « exactitude » et le « soin » apportés à cette table par sa « consoeur en chimie » sont salués par Fourcroy, lui-même. Cette table de 170 pages, est un des minces indicateurs de l’implication de Madame Dupiery dans l’entreprise scientifique. Que peut-elle nous apprendre quant aux savoirs mis en jeu par cette « collaboratrice » de l’ombre ?

• Discussion sur le programme du séminaire pour l’année 2015-2016

• Discussion, animée par Florence Bretelle-Establet et Stéphane Schmitt, sur la préparation de l’ouvrage "Pieces and parts in scientific texts".

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jeudi 16 avril , 9:30–16:00, salle Malevitch, 483A

Rencontre : “Collections used in The History of Sciences – Scholarly value, market value, patrimonial value”, organisée par Magali Dessagnes (SPHERE, CNRS & University Paris Diderot, SAW Project) et Christine Proust (CNRS, SPHERE & SAW Project), en dialogue avec le groupe SAW.

The historian of science who uses written objects kept in a collection as a source for his research may use information relating to the path of this object before they join the collection. It is for this reason that we are interested in the processes which led the objects into collections and some of the factors that affected their paths, by focusing specifically on issues relevant to historians of science collections. The process of building collections arise primarily the question of the value that different actors have given to these objects, of why they were torn from their original context, their circulation and their insertion or keeping them in a collection . It is more specifically to this question that day will be spent. Such objects from the time of their discovery until their use as exhibit or source for the work of a researcher, pass from hand to hand, those collectors, but also those of excavators, antiquarian or adventurers. It took each of them in turn to assign them a value so that they are inserted, ultimately, in a given collection.

However, these values differ, depending on the view that each has of the object and his objective in regard to that object. What is the value of a document for different actors who had it in the hands ? And how this valuation has affected the movement of the object relative to others ? To this general question, we associate, in the context of the SAW project, more specific issues. How the academic knowledge, especially mathematics, of which a document testifies, are interacted with the value that different types of actors gave him ? How the valuation of an object, in certain contexts, elicited historical research on the scholarly content, and in particular mathematics, related to these objects ? Can we identify different types of knowledge of the history of mathematics that would sometimes influence the value of a given object ? How a particular content knowledge of a document could, for example, transform his market value ? The objectives that govern the formation of a collection depend on different types of value given to objects and therefore these values influence the constitution of the collection. How these elements could change our approach of the sources of the history of science ? This is an issue that will remain to the horizon of our concerns during the study day.

• Wendy Shaw (Freie Universität Berlin)
  Intersecting Narratives, Interpolating Collections : the Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin.

• Magali Dessagnes (University Paris Diderot, SPHERE & projet SAW)
  Elias Géjou, seller of antiquities from Mesopotamia, heart of a network of collectors and scholars.

Table ronde animée par Florence Bretelle-Establet (CNRS, SPHERE & SAW Project), avec la participation de Jens Høyrup (Roskilde University) et d’Agathe Keller (CNRS, SPHERE & SAW Project)

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lundi et mardi 23 – 24 mars
Colloque conjoint SAW & Brown University : “Science & scholarship in Late Babylonian Uruk”, organisé par Christine Proust et John Steele.

Programme et résumés.

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Groupe de travail “How do Writings in the Astral Sciences Document Mathematical Practices & the Practitioners ?", organisé par Matthieu Husson, Rich Kremer, avec le groupe SAW (3 séances)

3– jeudi 19 février, salle Mondrian, 646A

• 9:30–11:30 : Li Liang (Beijing Institute for the History of Natural Science and researcher invited by the SAW project)
  Procedural table as a tool : The calculations in Chinese calendric astronomy.
• 11:45–13:00 & 14:15–15:00 : Mathieu Ossendrijver (Berlin Humboldt University, Topoi, and researcher invited by the SAW project)
  Astronomical tables of the spread sheet type
• 15:15–17:15 : Matthias Hayek (CRCAO, Université Paris Diderot)
  Rotating Disks and Straight Rulers : Paper Instruments in Japanese Early Modern Divination Manuals.

2– jeudi 5 février, salle Mondrian, 646A

• 9:30–11:30 : Daniel Morgan (ERC-SAW, SPHERE)
  Sphere Confusion : The Textual Reconstruction of First-millennium hun Instruments
• 11:45–13:00 & 14:15–15:00 : Sho Hirose (ERC-SAW, SPHERE)
  What were the functions of the armillary sphere in Paramesvara’s Goladīpikā ?
• 15:15–17:15 : Nathan Sidoli (Wasada University, Tokyo, and researcher invited by the SAW project)
  The use of physical devices to do computation. Selections from Ptolemy’s Analemma, and Heron’s Dioptra 35.

1– jeudi 15 janvier 2015, salle Mondrian, 646A

• 9:30–11:30 : Sebastian Falk (Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge)
  Amateur astronomers learning with tables : the case of the Equatorie of the Planetis
• 11:45–13:00 & 14:15–15:00 : Matthieu Husson (CNRS-SYRTE, Observatoire de Paris and SAW project)
  John of Murs’ eclipse computation in the Escorial O II 10.
• 15:15–17:15 : Richard Kremer (Darmouth College and researcher invited by the SAW project)
  tba

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lundi à jeudi 1er – 4 décembre 2014, salle Klimt, 366A
Colloque “Shaping the Sciences of the Ancient World 2014”, organisé par Agathe Keller, avec le groupe SAW.

1er décembre Présidence : Agathe Keller
: : Editing documents

• Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan)
  Aleatoric Textuality : On the Tracks of a Very Ancient Philology.
  Discutants : Daniel Morgan (CNRS, SAW) & Christine Proust (CNRS, SPHERE, SAW)

12:00 – 13:00 & 14:00 – 15:00

• Jerrold Cooper (Johns Hopkins University)
  Editing the Sumerians : How and Why ?
  Discutants : Justin Smith (Univ. Paris Diderot, SPHERE) & Pierre Chaigneau (Univ. Paris Diderot, SAW, SPHERE)

15:30 – 17:30

• Karin Preisendanz (University of Vienna)
  Editing a Foundational Work on Classical Indian Medicine : The Printed Editions of the Carakasamhitā in context.
  Discutantes : Florence Bretelle-Establet (CNRS, SPHERE) & Magali Dessagnes (Univ. Paris Diderot, SAW, SPHERE)

2 décembre Présidence : Piotr Michalowski

: : Editing documents (suite)

09:30 – 11:30

• Micheline Decorps-Foulquier (SPHERE)
  The Critical Edition of Mathematical Texts of Greek Antiquity : Questions of method.
  Discutants : Karine Chemla (CNRS, SPHERE, SAW) & Sho Hirose (Univ. Paris Diderot, SAW, SPHERE)

: : Politics (and the receptions) of critical editions
12:00 – 13:00 & 14:00 – 15:00

• Han Qi (Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing)
  Rethinking the Ancient Mathematical Text : Ming-Qing Scholars’ Critical Reflections on The Gnomon of Zhou [Dynasty]
  Discutantes : Charlotte de Varent (Univ. Paris Diderot, SAW, SPHERE) & Martina Schneider (CNRS, SAW)

15:30 – 17:30

• George Vlahakis (Hellenic Open University)
  Greeks on Hellenes. Ancient Greek scientific texts critically edited in 18th-19th century Greece.
  Discutantes : Agathe Keller & Micheline Decorps-Foulquier

3 décembre Présidence : Karin Preisendanz

: : Printing it out

09:30 – 11:30

• Zhu Yiwen (Institute of Logic and Cognition & Department of Philosophy, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou) & Zheng Cheng (Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing)
  On the First Printed Edition of Mathematical Book in Nine Chapters (1842).
  Discutants : Ivahn Smadja (Univ. Paris Diderot, SAW, SPHERE) & Chen Zhihui (SAW)

12:00 – 13:00 & 14:00 – 15:00

• Alessandro Graheli (University of Vienna)
  The Editio Princeps of the Nyāyabhāṣya.
  Discutants : Stéphane Schmitt (CNRS, SPHERE) & Justin Smith (Univ. Paris Diderot, SPHERE)

15:30 – 17:30

• Agathe Keller (CNRS, SPHERE, SAW)
  What do you do with commentaries ? What do you do with structure ? H. T. Colebroooke, Sudhākara Dvivedi and the mathematical chapter of the Brahma-sphuṭa-siddhānta.
  Discutants : Zhou Xiaohan & Martina Schneider, (SAW)

4 décembre Présidence : Karine Chemla (CNRS, SPHERE, SAW)
: : Practices of editing Numbers and Diagrams

09:30 – 11:30

• Christine Proust (CNRS, SPHERE, SAW)
  Representing numbers and quantities in editions of mathematical cuneiform texts.
  Discutants : Julie Lefebvre & Pierre Chaigneau (Univ. Paris Diderot, SAW, SPHERE)

12:00 – 13:00 & 14:00 – 15:00

• Mathieu Ossendrijver (to be confirmed)
  Babylonian Astronomy : editing and interpreting an ancient science.
  Discutants : Chen Zhihui & Matthieu Husson

Break

15:30

• Karine Chemla
  Concluding remarks (and discussion).

Programme.

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jeudi 13 novembre, salle Mondrian, 646A

: : Forms of written knowledge : Compilations, note-taking, commentaries

• Elaine Leong (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
  Creating Treasuries for Health : Knowledge Codification in the ‘Margins’.
  Early modern householders were bombarded with health-related in-formation. Know-how was exchanged during medical consultations with physicians and other medical practitioners, around dinner tables with friends and family, scribbled on little paper slips and sent with letters and proffered between the covers of the myriad of printed medical books. These sorts of know-how ranged from recipes de-tailing how to make secret remedies to the information on the wondrous properties of new materia medica to drug shopping tips to gardening information on harvesting of herbs. With theirfamily’s health maintenance and potential sicknesses never far from their minds, householders eagerly collected and treasured such information. As a result, many households collectively compiled large notebooks filled to the brim with medical knowledge. With new and seemingly unique and important information flooding in from so many avenues, householders often felt the same sense of infor-mation overload experienced by Renaissance scholars and like scholars, they used a range of sophisticated information management technologies to shape, control and create their treasuries of health. This paper examines the notebooks of three seven-teenth-century English families, the Boscawens, the St. Johns and the Temples, to explore the various note-taking strategies they adopted to manage their ever-growing collections. It will argue that householders adopted a number of information management strategies such as list making, extracting, commonplacing and the use of tables, columns and rough and waste books in their medical notebooks. It posits that in-depth studies of these notebooks give historians of science and medicine rare glimpses into practices of natural inquiry and knowledge codification outside the learned academy. Finally, these texts encourage us to consider early modern paper tools, technologies and information management systems within broader contexts.

• Sho Hirose (SAW ERC Project, SPHERE)
  Revision or new work ? What lies between the two Goladīpikās.
  In this presentation I focus on two texts titled “Goladīpikā (illumination of the spheres)” composed by the same author Parameśvara (c.1360 -1460, Kerala, In-dia). Both works were guides on spherical astronomy, and include common topics like instructions on constructing armillary spheres, usage of gnomons and positions of planets in the sky. However these topics are scattered in different order throughout both texts, and the way the two texts are subdivided appears to be very different. Was one of them a revision of the other, or were they composed for different purposes and readers ? I shall look into their chronological orders and the author’s intention.

• Eva Wilden (CSMC, Hamburg)
  Text, pretext, paratext — commentaries in manuscripts of the Tamil literary-grammatical tradition.
  Commentaries play a central role in the Indian traditions of learning, and Tamil, the second great classical language of the subcontinent after Sanskrit, is no ex-ception in that respect. Tamil looks back on a period of about 2000 years of producing lyrical poetry, while at the same time developing a system of grammar, metrics and poetics meant, in the first place, to describe this body of poetry, to enable young poets to master their craft and to safeguard its understanding for future generations. Once established, then, the theoretical domains also began to have a dynamics of their own, which in part were to have repercussions back in the practical field. The material link between theory and practice is found in the twofold commentary tradition. Commentaries on poetry explain the text and its literary implications, thus displaying mastery of the treatises whose rules are applied, exploited and quoted. Commentaries on grammar elucidate the rules and give examples, often by the thousands, from poetry.
  The simplest typeof commentary consists of a conglomeration of isolated glosses, picking out a difficult word here or there, perhaps followed by a remark on syntax. The more complex form is a paraphrase of the whole verse –poetic or theoretical, a root text always is metrical –that supplies the case endings and grammatical relations missing in the word-order oriented original and exchanges rare or complicated words for easier ones. This can be followed by a poetic or theoretical discussion with argument and counter-argument. Tendentially, the simpler gloss commentary is of an anonymous type, the discursive one has a named author.
  Typology seems easy enough when proceeding from the standard editions that, in the case of Tamil, where mostly produced between the later 19th and the early 20th century. Seen from the perspective of the primary witnesses, manuscripts on palm-leaf and paper, matters appear less straightforward. There is a considerable amount of fluidity in the size and wording of even the most well-established author commentaries. Given what we know about the Indian intellectual tradition where the root text is re-garded not only as primary in the evolutionary sense, but also as the frame of a theory or school, this should not come as a surprise : it is the commentary where discussion takes place, where new concepts are introduced and tested and where the development of thought is recorded.
  What manuscripts let us see is the process of text reception as it took place over centuries, new readers and copyists freely deleting and adding to a certain stock. A comparatively stable root text appears surrounded by invocations, blessings, mnemonic stanzas, titles and inter-titles, notes, colophons and finally commentary in a very wide sense of the word. A commentary can be just one among a surprisingly large number of para-texts or it can be a pretext for inscribing a new theoretical devel-opment into the folds of an established school, thus turning the normal relation be-tween text and para-text upside down.
  Documenting and analysing this whole process of transmission is the object of the ERC-financed project NETamil (“Going from Hand to Hand : Networks of Intellectual Exchange in the Tamil learned traditions”) of which I am the PI. The presentation will focus on demonstrating how joint work is realised intellectually on the one hand and physically on the other hand, pointing out the basic architecture and phrasal inventory of a Tamil commentary, which rightfully can be seen as a subtype of Indian commentary, and showing how this can be done in an almost zero-layout tradition on a palm-leaf with scriptio continua.

Années précédentes
Au cours de l’année 2010 – 2011, le séminaire s’est organisé sous la forme de journées mensuelles qui ont porté sur les thèmes suivants :

• Tables numériques et tableaux
• Organisation et usage des écrits savants
• Encyclopédies
• Paratextes et organisation matérielle des textes
• Prise de note & Inscription de l’oral
• Editions critiques des textes savants et Histoire de ces éditions critiques.
  
  

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