ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Pluralizing the Heritage: Ancient Authors Between Transmission, Contestation, and Reinvention

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The reception of ancient authors offers a particularly fertile ground for questioning the shift in perspective that the history of science demands today. For a long time, historiographical tradition reproduced a linear narrative of scholarly transmission: foundational “great authors,” endowed with near-unquestioned authority, were said to have provided the basis for continuous progress. Yet as soon as we broaden our view, this narrative appears reductive. The ancient texts themselves bear witness to a plurality of forms of knowledge—often conflicting—in which philosophical speculation, technical practices, vernacular traditions, and modes of knowing later marginalized in the historical record coexist.
Re-examining the reception of these authors thus means bringing to light the minoritized or dissident voices that were erased by a selective canon: peripheral commentators, non-European scholars who interpreted and transformed Greek science, and the medical or cosmological traditions that Western modernity labeled “heterodox.” This approach entails a form of epistemic disobedience: refusing to read ancient texts solely through the categories imposed by humanist or positivist interpretations, and instead restoring the diversity of uses, reinterpretations, and contestations that have shaped their transmission.
This symposium aims to foreground such plural dynamics, which make the study of ancient reception a critical space where the authority of a single narrative and the myth of homogeneous progress are challenged. It invites contributions that recognize that the sciences are built across multiple worlds, where truth is constantly contested, reformulated, and negotiated—and in which a change of perspective is not merely a methodological tool but an ethical imperative for understanding and renewing our relationship to scientific knowledge.
Contributions to this symposium will be based on case studies of works composed between Antiquity and the modern period. Both manuscript and printed sources will be examined.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chairs

• Carole Hofstetter, SPHERE, CNRS, Université Paris Cité

• Ε. A. Hunter, University of Chicago

Commentators

• Julia Tomasson, Rice University

• Ε. A. Hunter, University of Chicago

• Mia Joskowicz, Tel-Aviv University - CNRS-SPHère Paris

• Carole Hofstetter, SPHERE, CNRS, Université Paris Cité

Individual Presentations

• Archimedes on the Beach: Reading ancient Mathematics and Constructing Intellectual Authority in Early Modern Europe - Ε. A. Hunter, University of Chicago

• Dotted Lines and the Reconceptualization of Quantity in Early Modern Editions of Euclid’s Elements - Mia Joskowicz, Tel-Aviv University - CNRS-SPHère Paris

• Between Greek Tradition and Indo-Arabic Innovation: Reassessing Byzantine Algorithmic Culture - Carole Hofstetter, SPHERE, CNRS, Université Paris Cité

• Loud Manuscripts vs. Quiet Texts: Traditions of Euclid’s Elements in the Post-Classical Islamicate World - Julia Tomasson, Rice University

Session Organizer

• Carole Hofstetter, SPHERE, CNRS, Université Paris Cité