Writing Science: Medical and Mathematical Authorship in Ancient Greece

Abstract

Scientific and technological texts have not played a significant role in modern literary criticism. This collection, focusing mostly on medical and mathematical texts from ancient Greece, aims at approaching ancient Greek science from the cross-disciplinary perspective of authorship. Among the questions addressed are: How does scientific writing differ from 'literary' writing? In what ways does the author present himself as an authoritative figure? In addition to offering a new approach to this vast area of ancient literature, this collection reflects on the forms of scientific and scholarly c. Introduction; A. Comparisons; The Name and Nature of Science: Authorship in Social and Evolutionary Context; Ancient Writings, Modern Conceptions of Authorship. Reflections on Some Historical Processes That Shaped the Oldest Extant Mathematical Sources from Ancient China; Scholarship and Competitiveness: Pliny the Elder's Attitude towards His Predecessors in the Naturalis Historia; B. Greek Medical Writing; Writing the Animal: Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Galen; Galen and the Scientific Treatise: a Case Study of Mixtures; Galen on Poetic Testimony- The Violent Scholiast: Power Issues in Ancient Commentaries-C. Greek Mathematical Writing; Authorial Presence in the Ancient Exact Sciences; Accounts, Numeracy and Democracy in Classical Athens; Diagrammatic Reasoning: the Foundations of Mechanics; Three Introductions to Celestial Science in the First Century BC; D. Science Writing as/and Literature; On the Variety of 'Genres' of Greek Mathematical Writing: Thinking about Mathematical Texts and Modes of Mathematical Discourse; Sing, Muse, of the Hypotenuse: Influences of Poetry and Rhetoric on the Formation of Greek Mathematics. Making up Progress -- in Ancient Greek Science WritingIn Strange Lands: Disembodied Authority and the Role of the Physician in the Hippocratic Corpus and Beyond; Notes on Contributors; General Index; Index Locorum.