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Please join us on Monday, February 4th:<br><br>
<div align="center"><font size=4><b><u>STS Special Lecture<br><br>
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</u></font><font size=4 color="#0000FF">Artisans and their Philosophers:
Making and Reflecting Upon Early Modern Calculating Machines<br><br>
</font><font size=4>Matthew Jones</b> <br>
</font><b>Columbia University<br><br>
<font size=4>4:00 p.m., MIT, E51-095<br><br>
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Abstract:<br>
The history of early modern calculating machines is one of collaboration
and protracted struggle between "philosophical" inventors and
the skilled artisans essential for realizing the machines. These
"philosophical" inventors--most famously Blaise Pascal and
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz--were surprised and frustrated by the autonomy
of their laborers, though utterly dependent upon that autonomy. I recount
these philosopher-mathematicians' financial, technical, and intellectual
relations with their not-so-invisible artisans, before turning to the
second-order philosophical speculation prompted by their experiences in
attempting to organize skilled labor to realize machines, and in
attempting to secure monopoly protection for the machines. The need to
demonstrate the philosophers' sole invention or authorship of the
"essence" of the machines to the state prompted consideration
of the boundaries of reason and corporeal skill; so did the possibility
that calculating machines might serve as proxies for human reasoning.
Pascal and Leibniz's experiences in attempting to bring their machines to
practice animated their accounts of the different kinds of human
knowledge and skill, as well as their accounts of the hierarchy of beings
and the place of philosophers, artisans and calculating machines within
that hierarchy.<br><br>
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Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390<br>
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