Sciences, Philosophie, Histoire – UMR 7219, laboratoire SPHERE

Responsables : l’ensemble du groupe HSHT

PROGRAMME 2023-2024

• Jeudi, 26 octobre 2023, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Rothko 412B bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Bibliographies/Catalogues
  Org. Clément Bonvoisin, Marie Lacomme et Edgar Lejeune
  
  Arthur Perret (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, ELICO)
  De la critique bibliographique à l’écriture non-linéaire : la bibliographie annotée comme objet épistémologique
  Résumé :
  C’est une liste de références bibliographiques entrecoupée de remarques plus ou moins longues – parfois simplement descriptives, parfois porteuses de jugement. Mais ce n’est pas la « bibliographie critique » des revues : plus informelle, souvent auto-publiée, parfois étonnante dans sa présentation, c’est une autre forme de bibliographie annotée (ou commentée) que nous présentons ici. À partir de quelques exemples, nous verrons en quoi ce type de document constitue un objet épistémologique, ce qu’il reflète des évolutions du monde universitaire depuis les années 1960 (massification, informatisation), et ce qu’il suggère de l’avenir de la bibliographie.
  
  Giorgio Matteoli
  The Long Pre-History of Lalande’s Bibliographie astronomique
  Résumé :
  When Jérôme de Lalande published his Bibliographie astronomique in 1803, he stood at the apex of his career. As one of the most influent astronomers in Europe, he was well aware of the implicit power wielded by histories and bibliographies of a discipline such as astronomy, especially in an age when the production of such works remained relatively scarce – namely, that of presenting and organizing the past of the discipline by separating the chaff from the wheat to be fed to new generations of increasingly professionalized astronomers. Indeed, as Lalande himself recognizes in the preface to his work, it was the Ministry of Public Instruction who provided the means to carry out his enterprise ; and that is why ‘mere erudition’ and ‘completeness’ were never his objectives, for they would have rendered his book a ‘simple waste of time’. However, Lalande did not start accumulating data from scratch. He could rely on a long lineage of direct predecessor who had been accumulating bibliographical materials in the previous two centuries, within the same State-driven economy of astronomical knowledge. As I will show on the basis of recent archival research, it was Giovanni Domenico Cassini who, at the end of the XVII century, started organizing astronomical materials in his capacity of chief scientific administrator for the Parisian Academy of Sciences. Later, his pupil Joseph-Nicolas Delisle resumed this project from where it was left, putting it on an entirely new footing. He soon started to involve other scholars from all over Europe to help gathering the information he needed ; sometimes, he even commissioned others (like the Wittenberg wolffian scholar Johann Friedrich Weidler) to complete some its parts. Even though Delisle’s work was ultimately left unaccomplished, his pupil Lalande took it up once again and extensively deployed it in compiling his Bibliographie, thereby embedding it in the wider structure of the Ancient Régime’s political epistemology of astronomy.
  
  Valérie Neveu (Université d’Angers)
  Les catalogues des imprimés de la bibliothèque de Thou (1617-1679) : du catalogue de collection privée au modèle bibliographique
  Résumé :
  L’objectif de cette présentation est de montrer, à travers une collection emblématique, comment le travail fait par les gestionnaires de bibliothèques des XVIe et XVIIe s. a construit un nouveau savoir scientifique, qu’on appellera la bibliographie : cette discipline consiste à décrire et classer les livres de toutes sciences, pour l’utilité de la communauté des chercheurs. L’art du catalogage (décrire les unités physiques d’une bibliothèque donnée) et de la bibliographie (décrire des livres, indépendamment de leur localisation) sont souvent entremêlés, comme le montre l’exemple de la bibliothèque de Thou, décrite d’abord par un catalogue d’usage privé, puis à son dernier stade par une publication imprimée qui pourra faire office de bibliographie.
  Le premier catalogue de 1617, achevé à la mort du parlementaire, homme politique, poète et historien Jacques-Auguste Ier de Thou, montre un degré de perfection unique pour cette époque, parce que de Thou, au lieu de rédiger un inventaire sommaire de sa bibliothèque à l’instar de ses contemporains, s’est fondé sur la littérature bibliographique déjà étoffée au XVIe s., afin de rédiger des notices exactes et structurées, et de les organiser thématiquement selon une classification des sciences réfléchie. Il s’agit d’un catalogue privé mais qui a pu être connu plus largement du monde savant puisque la bibliothèque était ouverte aux chercheurs. Un 2e catalogue (1645-1648) alphabétique, conforme aux préférences des frères Dupuy alors gestionnaires de la bibliothèque, suppose de vastes connaissances bibliographiques pour pouvoir être utilisé, en mode recherche par auteurs uniquement. Pour réparer cette lacune, l’héritier Jacques-Auguste II de Thou commande à l’astronome Ismaël Boulliau un 2e catalogue thématique, achevé en 1653, selon un plan différent du catalogue de 1617, avec une classification encore plus précise et raffinée. C’est ce catalogue qui sera imprimé en 1679 pour la vente de la bibliothèque, après la faillite et le décès de Jacques-Auguste II. Cet ouvrage perd dès lors sa fonction technique de catalogue de bibliothèque pour devenir un "monument bibliographique" de référence, connu dans toute l’Europe et régulièrement cité par la littérature savante.
  Sources :
  Catalogues manuscrits localisés à la BnF et dans des bibliothèques étrangères (Bruxelles, New York) : documents en partie numérisés + photos personnelles de VN
  Catalogus bibliothecae Thuanae, Paris, 1679

• Jeudi, 9 novembre 2023, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Rothko 412B bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Adaptations/summaries
  Org. K. Chemla
  
  Julie Lefebvre
  tba
  
  Wang Xiaofei (IHNS, Beijing, & SPHERE)
  How the notes from Fourier’s course at the Ecole Polytechnique were produced
  Résumé :
  The manuscripts Ms. 1852 and Ms.2044 are two individuals’ notes deriving from Joseph Fourier’s course of analysis at the Ecole Polytechnique. Each manuscript contains the notes of the lectures Fourier gave to different classes of students at the school during the year 1796. This talk will focus on the process of the production of these notes. Through an analysis of the textual features of the two manuscripts, it aims to clarify their factual relationship with Fourier’s teaching.
  
  Clément Bonvoisin
  Building (on) a commentary : Tsien Hsue-shen’s Engineering Cybernetics (1954) as a case study for adaptions in the history of science
  Résumé :
  In 1954, Tsien Hsue-shen (1911 – 2009), a Chinese-born engineer then living and working in the United States, published a monograph under the title Engineering cybernetics. The goal of the book, as stated by the author in his preface, was to make use of the then-active field of cybernetics to organise engineering practices into a science. An instance of such practices was what engineers usually called relay servomechanisms – roughly speaking, mechanisms switching between two states to regulate the behaviour of a given system. Tsien devoted a chapter of his monograph to such relay servomechanisms. In this talk, I will focus on several sections of this chapter, in which the author commented on a Ph.D dissertation that had been defended in 1952 by American mathematician Donald Bushaw (1926 – 2012). In a nutshell, as a graduate student at Princeton University, Bushaw had investigated the optimal design of certain relay servomechanisms from a mathematical viewpoint. In the course of his research, he derived some results for the optimal design of a specific family of devices – namely, second order linear relay servomechanisms. Although the dissertation had a restricted distribution list, Tsien discussed Bushaw’s results in his book, thus disclosing it to a broader audience. As it happens, as early as 1956, a Russian translation of Tsien’s monograph was edited in the Soviet Union. This translation allowed a group of Moscow-based mathematicians, gathered by Academician Lev Pontryagin (1908 – 1988) to work on related matters, to gain access to Bushaw’s achievements and to make use of it.
  In my view, this situation raises a set of questions for the history of science, pertaining to the adaptation of scientific works. How has Tsien adapted Bushaw’s work to his own agenda ? In doing so, how did he transform Bushaw’s work ? In receiving an adapted version of Bushaw’s result, what were Soviet mathematicians able to do ? And, to what extent did this version impact their own work ? Such are the questions that I intend to address in this talk.

• Jeudi, 7 décembre 2023, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Rothko 412B bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Diagrammatic dimensions of textual elements
  
  Edgar Lejeune (Centre Alexandre Koyré, EHESS)
  What is the difference between plotting a graph by hand and generating it automatically ? Epistemological consequences of two approaches of vizualisations in the humanities (France, 1960-1980)
  Résumé :
  From the early 1960s onwards, two competing models of data analysis were developed in France for the humanities and social sciences. On the one hand, mathematician Jean-Paul Benzécri (1932-2019) and his team worked on a series of computer-assisted mathematical procedures, such as the famous correspondence analyses. On the other hand, cartographer and semiologist Jacques Bertin (1918-2010) developed with his colleagues data analysis methods that relied on the manual manipulation of cardboard files or reorderable matrices made of plastic dominoes.
  Behind these different material and epistemological approaches are two opposing visions of how to produce visualizations for data analysis. In Benzécri’s approach, visualizations are automatically generated by computer. In doing so, the structure of the dataset ’appears’ to the researcher in the form of a printer output. The researcher must then decipher a visualization derived from a mathematical procedure. In contrast, the methods developed by Bertin require no mathematical knowledge. Instead, the researcher handles physical artifacts representing the data, with the aim of revealing the structure of the dataset step by step, guided by his visual perception.
  How do these two regimes of visualization production affect the epistemology of researchers ? What are the theoretical discourses associated with these two approaches ? And to what extent a comparison between them shed light on the epistemological consequences of automatic generation of scientific visualizations ? We will address these questions on the basis of a few case studies and an extensive theoretical literature produced by Jacques Bertin and his colleagues.
  
  Scott Trigg (SYRTE, Observatoire de Paris)
  tba
  
  Karine Chemla (SPHERE)
  Diagrams as discourse
  Résumé :
  In this talk, I focus on diagrams used to work on equations as evidenced in Chinese sources from the eleventh century on. I examine the part played by these diagrams in the discourse, through their diagrammatic features as well as the textual mentions added to them. My aim is to show that without reading the diagrams as discourse we lose key parts of the knowledge to which the writings testify.

• Jeudi, 11 janvier 2024, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Textual transmissions
  Org. K. Chemla
  
  Mau Chuanhui (Ts’ing-hua national university and SPHERE, Professeure invitée)
  tba
  
  Carole Hofstetter (SPHERE, ANR Access ERC),
  Reading circles of the Introduction to Arithmetic in Byzantium (Part 2)
  Résumé :
  This presentation is the second part of the paper presented at the ’HSHT’ seminar in 2022-2023 under the title ‘Reading circles of the Introduction to Arithmetic in Byzantium (XIIIth-XIVth c.)’.
  The treatise, composed by Nicomachus of Gerasa (1st-2nd c. AD), is known to us from nearly fifty manuscript copies produced in medieval Byzantium.
  The frequent use of the text in this period for the study of arithmetic meant that this part of the manuscript tradition was heavily contaminated. By identifying circles of reading and study of the text, the aim is to propose an approach, complementary to that of philology, to account for the relationships between witnesses that are both philologically and chronologically close, where the classic tools of philology do not always provide a reliable answer.
  
  Costantino Moretti (École française d’Extrême-Orient)
  Random Notes on Standards, Textual and Formal Variants in Dunhuang Buddhist Manuscripts (Second Part)
  Résumé :
  The notion of “mistake” and that of “textual variant” share, at times, some ambiguities. By comparing several manuscripts containing the same Chinese Buddhist scripture, for example, it becomes apparent that a number of presumed variants in modern edited texts are in fact simple scribal copying errors. In most cases, these mistakes are produced due to a chain of factors whose combination leads to accidental textual corruption, or due to a misunderstanding of the source-manuscript layout.
  In the second part of my talk, I will point out additional considerations regarding variants/alterations that involve a modification of the text layout, i.e. “formal variants”, which can determine a misconstruction of the manuscript that served as the basis for producing a given copy.

• Jeudi, 8 février 2024, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Modularity/Reorganisations
  Org. Arilès Remaki
  
  Arilès Remaki
  tba
  
  Célestin Xiaohan Zhou
  tba
  
  Erika Luciano
  tba

• Jeudi, 28 mars 2024, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Erasing/Crossing out
  Org. Emmylou Haffner
  
  Emmylou Haffner (ITEM, ENS Ulm)
  Que sont les ratures et à quoi servent-elles ?
  Résumé :
  Les brouillons du mathématicien, qui nous donnent à voir les processus de recherche et d’écriture de leur auteur, contiennent notamment un certain nombre de ratures. Dans cet exposé je propose une première réflexion sur le statut et rôle des différents types de ratures dans les brouillons mathématiques. Je suggérerai qu’il existe plusieurs sortes de ratures – on ne corrige pas que les erreurs – et que celles-ci témoignent de différents actes d’écriture, d’un auteur à l’autre mais aussi chez un même auteur. Je me concentrerai sur des textes allemands et français du 19e et début du 20e siècle.
  
  David Rabouin (SPHERE, CNRS—UPC)
  De l’importance et de la difficulté d’éditer les ratures
  Résumé :
  L’étude des ratures est un élément essentiel pour tenter de reconstituer le cheminement de pensée d’un auteur comme dans son acte même. Il s’agit de ce qu’on pourrait appeler l’approche locale des ratures. Mais il est également possible de trouver dans les ratures des éléments d’une évolution globale, des points où la pensée d’un auteur change pour évoluer vers quelque chose de nouveau. C’est notamment le cas quand on peut repérer des ratures/corrections que l’auteur fait systématiquement. Ce type de ratures n’a pas encore fait, à ma connaissance, l’objet d’une analyse méthodologique approfondie, alors même qu’elle est de très grande importance et pose des problèmes éditoriaux spécifiques. Dans cet exposé, je donnerai trois exemples de cette approche globale dans le cas des manuscrits mathématiques de Leibniz.
  
  Martha Cecilia Bustamante (SPHERE)
  tba

• Jeudi, 25 avril 2024, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Colors
  Org. K. Chemla
  
  Introduction, by Matthieu Husson and Divna Manolova
  
  Divna Manolova ( SYRTE, PSL-Observatoire de Paris, CNRS)
  Colour Equates Light, Colour Equates Knowledge
  Résumé :
  I study the use of polychromy in the corpus of Byzantine manuscripts preserving Cleomedes’ The Heavens (80+ manuscripts) and related texts, that is medieval Greek exegetical texts which tend to accompany the Stoic treatise, especially in codices produced from the thirteenth century onwards. I focus on those diagrams that involve one or more of the luminaries, or the stars more generally, and are concerned with the representation of light or its absence. While some parts of The Heavens explicitly refer readers to a visual representation (diagrammatic or otherwise), more often than not when diagrams are featured on the folio, what prompts their inclusion is less clear. Further, what motivates the use of differently coloured lines is rarely reflected on by the scribes, scholars and draftsmen and therefore it requires an interpretation.
  My approach relies on the assumption that (in Byzantine manuscripts) colour, or rather polychromy, equates light. While monochromy in diagrams (using a single-coloured line to draft the image) is sufficient to make a figure visible as opposed to the use of a hard point, the use of multiple colours adds information and complicates further the meaning of the diagram design. In the case of lunisolar diagrams the use of polychromy is less concerned with questions of hue and more with expressing brightness and the presence or absence of light (light is emitted or reflected, it is directional, it is present or absent). Polychromy in diagrams allows for the synchronic operation of multiple layers of meaning related to knowledge about the cosmos acquired through the medium of sight. In terms of expertise and practice, it also indicates access to pigments, knowledge of the preparation of inks and of their application, as well as of graphic and symbolic grammars related but not limited to representations of textures, materiality, and dimensionality. Thus, the use of polychromy points out to the culturally-defined encoding of information and allows us to ask questions concerning its ownership, control, access to and lack thereof, the expertise in, as well as the exchange, communication, and trade of this knowledge.
  
  Matthieu Husson (SYRTE PSL-Observatoire de Paris, CNRS)
  The colors of numbers : astronomers and scribes uses of colors in late medieval astronomical tables in Latin Europe
  Résumé :
  Late medieval astronomical manuscripts produced in Latin Europe regularly make use of inks and pigments of different colors, in their textual part, but also in numerical tables, diagrams and various illustrations. In this communication I want to explore this phenomenon in connection with numerical tables and reflect about the type of historical evidence these uses of colors in numerical tables may offer to the historian of astronomy.
  Relying on a corpus mainly taken from the manuscript tradition of John of Lignères Tabule Magne, of which I’m preparing a critical edition with Eleonora Andriani, I’m going to consider three aspects in the sources. First a codicological aspect : how colors present themselves in the document, what can we reconstruct of the production processes of the colored tables ? Second a readability aspect : How colors orient and assist the users in navigating the often complex layout of astronomical tables ? Third, an astronomical aspect : how certain uses of colors can also be embedded with an astronomical and mathematical meaning ? Overall I wish to argue that in the corpus I examine, different agencies intervene each with its own set of conventions and aims in relation to the uses of colors. These visual conventions are in some cases complementary but might also be conflicting with each other resulting in a rather diversified set of situations which uniquely document certain aspects of astronomical cultures.
  
  Florence Bretelle
  tba

• Jeudi, 16 mai 2024, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Commentaries
  
  Org. K. Chemla
  
  Marie Bizais-Lillig
  tba
  
  Guillaume Loizelet
  tba
  
  Agathe Keller
  tba

• Jeudi, 13 juin 2024, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Author/Authority
  Org. K. Chemla
  
  Stéphane Schmitt (Archives Henri Poincaré, Nancy)
  Qu’est-ce qu’une œuvre collective ? Le cas de l’Histoire naturelle des oiseaux (1770-1783)
  Résumé :
  L’Histoire naturelle des oiseaux (1770-1783) est, en principe, l’ouvrage du naturaliste Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788). Cependant, plusieurs autres personnes participèrent à son élaboration. Sans parler de l’illustration, même si on considère le texte seul, plusieurs personnages ont contribué à sa rédaction. Leur statut est varié, de Guéneau de Montbeillard qui signe ses chapitres (mais pas au début...), à Sonnini de Manoncourt, dont le travail ne peut être que suspecté, en passant par l’abbé Bexon, dont le rôle est officiellement reconnu a posteriori, mais minimisé, comme le révèlent les manuscrits. Cet éventail de situations pose le problème de la composition d’un texte à plusieurs mains, et de la définition d’un auteur et d’une œuvre collective.
  
  Eric Gurevitch (Vanderbilt University)
  Contesting the Classics : The Toolkit of Philosophy and the Authority of Medicine
  Résumé :
  What was philosophy in Sanskrit good for ? This presentation poses this seemingly-simple question to explore the different tasks for which the toolkit of philosophy in Sanskrit was used. Philosophers writing in Sanskrit developed epistemic tools for making sense of texts and assessing the validity of truth claims. And from the medieval through the early modern period, these tools were put to use in questioning the authority of the Sanskrit medical classics. Following an extensive debate between the scholars Saura Vidyādhara and Bhaṭṭa Narahari about the authority of Vāgbhaṭa’s Heart of Medicine (Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayam) – before moving on to discuss different disputes raised in different medical texts and commentaries – this presentation explores the stakes of scholastic disputes over the origins and the practice of medicine.
  
  Organisation du séminaire de l’année prochaine

• Jeudi, 10 octobre 2024, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Translations

• Jeudi, 7 novembre 2024, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Editions : what is removed, what is added
  Org/speakers : Arilès

• Jeudi, 5 décembre 2024, 9h30 - 17h30, lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet Université Paris-Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante Paris 75013
  
  Lexicography

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