Celebrating Science in Ancient Greece and Rome

Nuncius ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liba Taub
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Intellectual Curiosity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Scientific Ideas ◽  
Scientific Achievements

Abstract Current ideas about the aims and value of scientific work and knowledge may be part of our inherited legacy from Greco-Roman antiquity. While financial rewards were important in the past and are important today, when we look at individual ancient Greeks and Romans known for their scientific ideas and achievement, we see that a number of these were avowedly pursuing science for a gain which was very specific, but not financial. Motivations might include intellectual curiosity and a desire for personal improvement, including increased understanding, as well as an interest in gaining reputation and influencing posterity. In Greco-Roman antiquity there were various ways in which an individual’s scientific achievements could be celebrated, commemorated, honoured and memorialised; several are considered here.

Classics and Media Theory

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Of Greece

The aim of this volume is to introduce a largely neglected area of existing interactions between Greco-Roman antiquity and media theory. It addresses the question of why interactions in this area matter, and how they might be developed further. The volume seeks to promote more media attentiveness among scholars of Greece and Rome. It also aims to create more awareness of the presence of the classics in media theory. It foregrounds the persistency of Greco-Roman paradigms across the different strands of media theory. And it calls for a closer consideration of the conceptual underpinnings of scholarly practices around the transformation of ancient Greece and Rome into ‘classical’ cultures.

Local antiquaries and the expansive sense of the past: a case study from Counter-Reformation Spain

2018 ◽  
pp. 167-189
Author(s):  
Katrina B. Olds
Keyword(s):  
Local History ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Roman Antiquity

In the seventeenth century, Spanish antiquarians collected inscriptions, coins, and other evidence of their community’s illustrious Christian origins, conflictive medieval past, and glorious present. Efforts to compile a suitable local history were particularly determined and prolific in the Andalusian diocese of Jaén, where two local enthusiasts of the past – Francisco de Rus Puerta and Martín Ximena Jurado – generated a voluminous body of manuscripts and printed books under the sponsorship of Jaén’s bishop. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Jaén’s antiquaries documented the past in both text and image, as the authors sketched coins, ruins in situ, and ongoing excavations for antiquities and saints’ relics. In these efforts, Greco-Roman antiquity played the handmaiden to the early Christian era, for it was of intense concern for Andalusian Catholics to prove that the Islamic invasion had not disrupted the region’s deep and essential Christian identity. In this way, ‘antiquity’ was a rather motley-coloured creature, encompassing not only the remains of Roman Hispania, but also including pre-Roman antiquities from Spain’s early Greek, Phoenician, and Celtiberian peoples, as well as Visigothic and some Islamic artefacts.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Pantelis Michelakis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Systematic Exploration ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
Analytical Work ◽  
Roman Antiquity

This chapter sketches out some of the features of the encounter between media theory and Greco-Roman antiquity in two complementary ways: as a field of knowledge awaiting further systematic exploration and analysis, but also as a set of methods that under the banner of ‘cultural transmission’ brings together practices for producing and processing knowledge that are fundamental to the way in which ancient cultures become ‘classical’. The discussion begins with the concept of the medium and the promise it holds for analytical work in the study of the past. It then moves on to the role of mediation in thinking about the cultural significance of communication across time and perception. It continues with a consideration of classical studies and media studies as disciplines, focusing on the kinds of research that can be pursued at their intersection. The chapter concludes with an overview of the contributions that follow.

scholarly journals The Classical in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture – an Introduction

CLARA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bente Kiilerich
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Luxury Brands ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
The Impact

This special issue of CLARA titled ‘The Classical in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture’ focuses on the impact of Greco-Roman antiquity on present day art and culture. Over the last few decades, antique statues have been revived again and again, turning up in new guises in contemporary art from all over the globe. In addition to new works based on specific ancient statues, some artists create art that references the past in a more general way. Other artists question the divide between past and present raising the possibility of ‘multi-temporality’, a phenomenon that will be explored in connection with recent exhibitions. Another aspect of the interaction of antiquity and the contemporary world is the association between luxury brands and antique monuments, fashion brands taking on the role of patrons, paying large sums for the restoration of Roman landmarks. By studying various types of exchanges between the classical and the contemporary, the papers aim to throw light on why artists and designers continue to draw inspiration from ancient art; in short, why antiquity continues to fascinate.

Searching for Political Parties in the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

Machine learning for rediscovering revolutionary ideas of the past

2021 ◽  
pp. 105971232098304
Author(s):  
R Alexander Bentley ◽  
Joshua Borycz ◽  
Simon Carrignon ◽  
Damian J Ruck ◽  
Michael J O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Phylogenetic Inference ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Inherent Nature ◽  
Social Learning Processes ◽  
High Level ◽  
Scientific Ideas ◽  
Revolutionary Science

The explosion of online knowledge has made knowledge, paradoxically, difficult to find. A web or journal search might retrieve thousands of articles, ranked in a manner that is biased by, for example, popularity or eigenvalue centrality rather than by informed relevance to the complex query. With hundreds of thousands of articles published each year, the dense, tangled thicket of knowledge grows even more entwined. Although natural language processing and new methods of generating knowledge graphs can extract increasingly high-level interpretations from research articles, the results are inevitably biased toward recent, popular, and/or prestigious sources. This is a result of the inherent nature of human social-learning processes. To preserve and even rediscover lost scientific ideas, we employ the theory that scientific progress is punctuated by means of inspired, revolutionary ideas at the origin of new paradigms. Using a brief case example, we suggest how phylogenetic inference might be used to rediscover potentially useful lost discoveries, as a way in which machines could help drive revolutionary science.

Soul of Classicality in Western Architectural Design

2014 ◽  
Vol 638-640 ◽  
pp. 2253-2256
Author(s):  
Cong Ru Liu ◽  
Ming Sen Lin ◽  
Qing Li
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Architecture Design ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The Past ◽  
Renaissance Period

The classicality of the western architecture establishes its foundation at the beginning of the ancient Greece, is flourished in the ancient Rome and revitalized in the renaissance period, extends to the classicism and the classical revival, and finally is overthrown by the postmodernism. By going through development and prosperity in the past thousands of years, the classical spirit has always played a greatly significant role in the field of western architecture design.

At the Still Point of the Turning World: Freud's Reception of Winckelmann's Greece

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Sharon Kool
Keyword(s):  
Vital Role ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Cultural Ideal ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
With Memory ◽  
Of Greece

Freud's theory is primarily concerned with memory, about the present contained within the past. It is also rooted to the past in another way; Freud's reception of the Greek classical tradition played a vital role in the genesis of his oeuvre. Winckelmann's revival of ‘Greece’ dominated German culture up to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, yet besides the importance of Bildung in shaping Freud's early Gymnasium experience, his influence upon Freud is often neglected. While Freud's debt to German Hellenism is clearly demonstrated in his library of classical literature and his collection of Greco-Roman antiquities, the afterlife of Winckelmann's legacy is more subtly inscribed upon psychoanalysis. This paper focuses on Winckelmann's aesthetic reconstruction of classical Greece which made beauty, self-restraint and repression a cultural ideal to be imitated and admired. It is argued that hysteria provided one of the most powerful challenges to this ideal. Psychoanalysis can thus be seen as developing out of a milieu that was still overshadowed by Winckelmann's idealization of Greece. Further, it is argued that Winckelmann advanced a homoerotic tradition in German culture and the sedimentation of this tradition can be discerned in Freud's response to hysteria, his privileging of the masculine and his theory of bisexuality.

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