[Sci-tech-public] STS Special Lecture by Matthew Jones on February 4th @ 4pm

[Debbie Meinbresse]

Please join us on Monday, February 4th:

STS Special Lecture


Artisans and their Philosophers: Making and Reflecting Upon Early 
Modern Calculating Machines

Matthew Jones
Columbia University

  4:00 p.m., MIT, E51-095


Abstract:
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.



Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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