Knowledge, text and practice in ancient technical writing /

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Bibliographic Details
Imprint:	Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2017. ©2017
Description:	xiii, 282 pages ; 24 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	Technical writing -- History and criticism. Classical literature -- History and criticism. Technology -- Greece -- History. Technology -- Rome -- History. Classical literature. Technical writing. Technology. Greece. Rome (Empire) Criticism, interpretation, etc. History.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11046064

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:	Formisano, Marco, editor. Eijk, Ph. J. van der (Philip J.), editor.
ISBN:	9781107169432 1107169437
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	The relationship between theory and practice, in other words between norms indicated in a text and their extra-textual application, is one of the most fascinating issues in the history and theory of science. Yet this aspect has often been taken for granted and never explored in depth. The essays contained in this volume provide a complex and nuanced discussion of this relationship as it emerges in ancient Greek and Roman culture in a number of fields, such as agriculture, architecture, the art of love, astronomy, ethics, mechanics, medicine, pharmacology. The main focus is on the textuality of processes of the transmission of knowledge and its application in various fields. Given that a text always contains complex and destabilising aspects that cannot be reduced to the specific subject matter it discusses, to what extent can and do ancient texts support extra-textual applicability?

Table of Contents:

From words to acts? / Philip van der Eijk and Marco Formisano
The poetics of knowledge / Marco Formisano
Machines on paper: from words to acts in ancient mechanics / Markus Asper
Architecture as "the art of the possible" / Elisa Romano
Caesar's Rhine bridge and its feasibility in Giovanni Giocondo's Expositio pontis / Ronny Kaiser
From words to acts: on the applicability of Hippocratic therapy / Pilar Pérez Cañizares
Naso magister erat
sed cui bono? : on not taking the poet's teaching seriously / Alison Sharrock
From techne to kakotechnia: use and abuse of ancient cosmetic texts / Laurence Totelin
From discourses to handbook: the Encheiridion of Epictetus as a practical guide to life / Gerard Boter
The problem of practical applicability in Ptolemy's Geography / Klaus Geus
Living according to the seasons : the power of parapegmata / Gerd Grasshoff
Auctoritas in the garden : Columella's poetic strategy in De re rustica 10 / Christiane Reitz
The generous text: animal intuition, human knowledge, and written transmission in Pliny's books on medicine / Brooke Holmes
From descriptions to acts : the paradoxical animals of the ancients from a cognitive perspective / Pietro Li Causi.

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