School of History and Philosophy of Science
RESEARCH SEMINAR
[The University of Sydney]
[https://d31hzlhk6di2h5.cloudfront.net/20261104/7a/c0/93/d0/05b73c5cf4d7ef8f638297d2_1276x730.jpg]
>From Ekphrasis to the Scientific Picture Book: The Flea, Microscopy, and Lost
>Skills of Description
Gideon Manning (Visiting Associate Professor, UCLA)
Date: Thursday, 12/11/2026
Start Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Madsen Room 331, Madsen Building F09, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006
How to register: Free, no registration required
Website:
https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/<https://t.e2ma.net/click/gyi6wy/8zmgipmb/oooav4e>
Abstract: I will be presenting new work on pictorial knowledge and visuality in
science. Specifically using the example of the flea, I will argue that the
flea was an object of serious study in Greco-Roman Antiquity and, in Galen’s De
usu partium, came to rely on ekphrasis (vivid description of a visual encounter
with a work of art). This centuries-long reliance on textual description would
be challenged by early modern microscopists, who were themselves heavily
invested in the communication of visual knowledge, by then including the use of
illustrations. In Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), illustrations were
systematically married to text-based descriptions. Ultimately, Hooke’s
illustrations, including his illustration of the flea, served to replace the
scientific object “in the world” with the scientific object “on the page.”
This transition to a scientific interest in “second nature” is still with us
and represents both a loss and a gain. Questions addressed in the talk will
include: How do visual knowledge and pictorial knowledge differ from
propositional knowledge? What historical factors—technological, intellectual,
and social—led to the creation of scientific picture books? What skills and
practices were lost when scientific-picture books became the standard means of
communicating visual knowledge in science?
Bio: Gideon Manning is a Visiting Associate Professor at UCLA Department of
Philosophy, Department of History, and Department of Comparative Literature.
His research focuses on the long dialogue among medicine, science, and
philosophy from Greek Antiquity to the present, with particular emphasis on
changing conceptions of the human and animal body, life, death, health,
explanation, and nature, as well as the rise of experimentation and mechanism
as they relate to these concepts. Areas of philosophical interest include the
history and philosophy of science and medicine, metaphysics, epistemology,
philosophy of mind, philosophy and literature, and early modern philosophy
(sixteenth-eighteenth centuries).
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