Month: November 2016

Genealogies of Knowledge I: Translating Political and Scientific Thought across Time and Space

Events, Project News

7-9 December 2017 1st Call for Papers   The production and circulation of knowledge across temporal and cultural spaces is a well-established research theme among classicists and historians of political thought, ideas, science and medicine, but recent developments have opened up new perspectives on this area of study. The study of social knowledge flows has advanced our understanding of these

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Tracing the Impact of Latin Translations of Arabic Texts on European Society

Articles, Publications
Euclid

In this article, Professor Charles Burnett, a world expert in the history of Islamic influences in Europe at The Warburg Institute (London University), retraces the impact the Latin translations of Arabic texts of science and philosophy had on the intellectual progress of Europe in the decisive period that preceded and prepared the Renaissance. The article is based on an interview

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Jan Buts

Project News
Jan Buts

I am happy to introduce myself as the Genealogies of Knowledge project’s new Ph.D. Student. At my alma mater, KU Leuven, I was trained as a linguist and literary scholar, specialising in the Dutch and English languages. During my early educational years, I developed a keen interest in poetry and rhetorical narratology, research fields which I tended to approach through

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Conference Announcement 2017

Events, Project News
Genealogies of Knowledge

Plans for holding the first international conference organized by the Genealogies of Knowledge team are well under way. The conference is intended to provide a space for scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to discuss various aspects of the impact of translation and other processes of mediation on the evolution of concepts across time and space. It will also provide an

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Arabic translators did far more than just preserve Greek philosophy

Articles, Publications
Socrates and his Students, illustration from 'Kitab Mukhtar al-Hikam wa-Mahasin al-Kilam' by Al-Mubashir, Turkish School, (13th c) Photo by Bridgeman

Peter Adamson (Professor of philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) In European antiquity, philosophers largely wrote in Greek. Even after the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean and the demise of paganism, philosophy was strongly associated with Hellenic culture. The leading thinkers of the Roman world, such as Cicero and Seneca, were steeped in Greek literature; Cicero even went

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