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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