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

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

All attendees must be in compliance with NYU's COVID-19 vaccination requirements (fully vaccinated and boosted, once eligible and by NYU's deadline) and be prepared to present proof of compliance if asked to do so (advanced upload is no longer required for visitors). Click here for NYU's campus access policy for visitors.

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.

Once we have seen the different ways in which knowledge practices can be compromised by corruption, both in ancient sources themselves and in our understanding of those sources, we can begin to appreciate some of the difficulties that can arise in articulating a clear and transhistorical notion of scientific progress. Ancient authors, for their part, were often ambivalent about progress, sometimes cleaving to a narrative about a lost golden age, and sometimes celebrating the triumphs of their own times or developments that they anticipated in the future. What might this mean for our own understandings of science, then and now?

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.

Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.

ISAW is committed to providing a positive and educational experience for all guests and participants who attend our public programming. We ask that all attendees follow the guidelines listed in our community standards policy.