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Title Authority and expertise in ancient scientific culture / edited by Jason König and Greg Woolf.

Publication Info. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xi, 473 pages)
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary How did ancient scientific and knowledge-ordering writers make their work authoritative? This book answers that question for a wide range of ancient disciplines, from mathematics, medicine, architecture and agriculture, through to law, historiography and philosophy - focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the literature of the Roman Empire. It draws attention to habits that these different fields had in common, while also showing how individual texts and authors manipulated standard techniques of self-authorisation in distinctive ways. It stresses the importance of competitive and assertive styles of self-presentation, and also examines some of the pressures that pulled in the opposite direction by looking at authors who chose to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge or resisted close identification with narrow versions of expert identity. A final chapter by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd offers a comparative account of scientific authority and expertise in ancient Chinese, Indian and Mesopotamian culture.
Contents Introduction : self-assertion and its alternatives in ancient scientific and technical writing / Jason König -- Philosophical authority in the imperial period / Michael Trapp -- Philosophical authority in the younger Seneca / Harry Hine -- Iurisperiti : 'men skilled in law' / Jill Harries -- Making and defending claims to authority in Vitruvius' De architectura / Daniel Harris-McCoy -- Fragile expertise and the authority of the past : the 'Roman art of war' / Marco Formisano -- Conflicting models of authority and expertise in Frontinus' Strategemata / Alice König -- The authority of writing in Varro's De re rustica / Aude Doody -- The limits of enquiry in imperial Greek didactice poetry / Emily Kneebone -- Ecpertise, 'character' and the 'authority effect' in the Early Roman history of Dionysius of Halicarnassus / Nicolas Wiater -- The authority of Galen's witnesses / Daryn Lehoux -- Anatomy and Aporia in Galen's On the construction of Fetuses / Ralph M. Rosen -- Varro the Roman cynic : the destruction of religious authority in the Antiquitates rerum divinarum / Leah Kronenberg -- Signs, seers and senatros : divinatory expertise in Cicero and Nigidius Figulus / Katharina Volk -- The public face of expertise : utility, zeal and collaboration in Prolemy's Syntaxis / Johannes Wietzke -- The authority of mathematical expertise and the question of ancient writing More geometrico / Reviel Netz -- Authority and expertise : some cross-cultural comparisons / G.E.R. Lloyd.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Science, Ancient.
Science, Ancient.
Science -- Greece -- History.
Greece.
History.
Science.
SCIENCE -- History.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Electronic books.
History.
Added Author König, Jason, editor.
Woolf, Greg, editor.
Other Form: Print version: Authority and expertise in ancient scientific culture. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, [2017] 9781107060067 (DLC) 2016023672 (OCoLC)951465370
ISBN 9781107446724 (electronic book)
1107446724 (electronic book)
9781316850145 (electronic book)
1316850145 (electronic book)
9781107060067 (hardback)
1107060060
9781107060067
9781107629646 (paperback)
1107629640