Empires and Exact Science in Pre-modern Eurasia

29-30 May 2006
Leiden, the Netherlands

Programme & abstracts

Aim of the Workshop
Historians of science currently devote significant attention to the imposition and reception of modern scientific theories in colonial societies. Typical themes include the ways that science was used rhetorically and politically to maintain the superiority of the colonizers, and the various strategies of rejection and appropriation in the reactions of the colonized.

These topics, important as they are, sometimes give the misleading impression that encounters with alien science are strictly a phenomenon of modern global imperialism. In fact, political expansion and the resultant exposure to new cultures have been reflected in changing scientific traditions ever since antiquity. The historical settings of these cross-cultural encounters include the spread of Greek (Hellenistic) dominance into the Near East and North Africa, and the subsequent merging of many former territories of the Roman Empire, along with parts of Iranian, Indian, and Chinese cultures, into the growing realm of Islam. Both colonizers and colonized in these settings altered their own scientific traditions in response to what they found among the "foreigners".

This workshop (a two-day event scheduled for Monday/Tuesday 29--30 May 2006, Leiden, Netherlands) examines such impacts of "foreign science" in ancient and medieval contexts. The chief theme is the explicit recognition and assimilation or modification of "foreign" elements in exact sciences, or changes within an existing scientific tradition in direct imitation of foreign texts or practices. Possible topics for the approximately eight or ten talks include:

* Languages of science: bilingual scientific dictionaries, translation movements

* Perceived advantages of foreign science: new capabilities, technological gains

* Reconciliation and rejection of foreign science, with respect to traditional cosmology/religion

* Imitation of the forms or techniques of foreign science within existing scientific practices

* Imperfect transmission, inadvertent transformation: scientific concepts lost (and found) in translation from foreign sources
 

Contact
For more information please contact the convenors Kim Plofker and Jan Hogendijk:
Kim Plofker or contact the IIAS