This book, in memory of Noel M. Swerdlow, brings together new work by prominent historians of the ancient Near Eastern, Indian, Arabic, Hebrew, Classical, Hellenistic, Medieval and Renaissance traditions of astronomy, astrology, philosophy and chronology to expand our knowledge and understanding of the plurality of early sciences from Babylonia to Greece, the Greco-Roman world, India and Europe. Premodern sciences are becoming ever more important to a broader narrative of the history of science and the astronomical sciences play a particularly significant role in this history. The chapters in this work offer in-depth studies of ancient, medieval and early modern texts in the history of the astronomical sciences and related fields, such as chronology. It is unique in its range of subjects, historical periods, and primary texts, treating Babylonian Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and Latin sources. It represents cutting-edge research from preeminent scholars in their fields and is therefore of great interest to both historians as well as philosophers of science.
Part I: Babylonia.- 1 Early Babylonian Astronomy: Observations and
Numerical Fits (Lis Brack-Bernsen).- 2 Neo-Assyrian Investigations into the
Prediction of Eclipses (John Steele).- 3 Babylonian Horoscopy and
Genethlialogy (Francesca Rochberg).- Part II: Greece.- 4 What Plato Meant by
Saying That God Is Always Doing Geometry: Responses to the Question Posed by
Plutarch in Table-Talk 8.2 (Liba Taub).- 5 Ptolemys Almagest and the
Philosophical Schools of the Second Century CE: Apuleius of Madaura (Alan C.
Bowen).- Part III: India.- 6 Visual Representations and Intertextualities in
Second Millennium Sanskrit Eclipse Reckoning (Clemency Montelle).- Part IV:
Europe.- 7 Levi ben Gersons Models for the Latitudes of Saturn and Jupiter
(Robert Morrison).- 8 Calculating the Length of Life in Sixteenth-Century
Europe: Arabic Astrology and Humanist Reforms (Margaret Gaida).- 9 Albertus
Magnuss First Lunar Model (Betsey Price).- 10 Historical Chronology before
Joseph Scaliger: Jean Bodin and His Discussion Partners (Anthony Grafton).-
11 Writing Celestial History in Early Modern Europe (Florence Hsia).
Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emerita in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology and the Office for the History of Science and Technology. She is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and winner of the John Frederick Lewis Award for Babylonian Horoscopes (American Philosophical Society, 1998). Recent publications are Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016, 2020), Hellenistic Astronomy: The Science in Its Contexts (co-edited with Alan C. Bowen, Brill, 2020), which received the Choice Award as Outstanding Academic Title 2020), and Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity: An Anthropology of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Rochberg is an Assyriologist and historian of science. Her work has consistently brought a cultural-historical perspective to the analysis of ancient science, culminating in her proposal to add the anthropology of science to currently existing history, philosophy, and sociology of science methods.
Lisainfo e-raamatute kohta