Next week, Daryn Lehoux, Queen’s National Scholar, Professor of Classics and Philosophy, will give NYU’s Twelfth Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series, a prestigious series of four lectures, named after the great ancient historian Michael I. Rostovtzeff. Daryn’s topic: “Epistemic Corruption and Epistemic Progress in Ancient Science”.
The series abstract: How did ancient Greek and Roman authors conceive of their own knowledge of the natural world? Did they see it as progressing and increasing, or as degenerating in some way? What did they see as the strengths or dangers posed by their own and others’ epistemic practices, and what are the strengths and dangers that we in turn face in interpreting and understanding those practices today? By framing these questions in terms of a larger category of ‘epistemic corruption,’ Professor Lehoux hopes to show that ancient ideas about knowledge practices are tightly correlated with claims about moral and bodily virtues and vices.
Daryn is the author of Astronomy, Weather, and Calendars in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 2007), What Did the Romans Know? (Chicago, 2012), and Creatures Born of Mud and Slime (Hopkins, 2017). He is co-editor of Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science (Oxford, 2013) and the author of more than forty articles on ancient science and epistemology.
Rostovtzeff Lecture Series | Lecture 1: "Sources of Corruption" | NYU