Rostovtzeff Lecture Series: Epistemic Corruption and Epistemic Progress in Ancient Science

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

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The Rostovtzeff Lectures are supported in part by a generous endowment fund given by Roger and Whitney Bagnall.

How did ancient Greek and Roman authors conceive of their own knowledge of the natural world? Did they see it as progressing and increasing, or as degenerating in some way? What did they see as the strengths or dangers posed by their own and others’ epistemic practices, and what are the strengths and dangers that we in turn face in interpreting and understanding those practices today? By framing these questions in terms of a larger category of ‘epistemic corruption,’ I hope to show that ancient ideas about knowledge practices are tightly correlated with claims about moral and bodily virtues and vices.

Greek and Latin authors were acutely aware of the problems of knowledge transmission. Not only could manuscripts become corrupted, as we know all too well today, or attributed to some more famous author, but also incorrect claims might creep into a scientific tradition all too easily. This lecture will look at how some influential Roman thinkers (Cicero, Galen, Ptolemy) worried about, and tried to control, the integrity and the stability of facts and fact-making.

Daryn Lehoux is Professor of Classics and Archaeology and Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University. He is the author of Astronomy, Weather, and Calendars in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 2007), What Did the Romans Know? (Chicago, 2012), and Creatures Born of Mud and Slime (Hopkins, 2017). He is co-editor of Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science (Oxford, 2013) and the author of more than forty articles on ancient science and epistemology.

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