Technical Automation In Classical Antiquity

Author : Maria Gerolemou
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350077615
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Technical Automation in Classical Antiquity written by Maria Gerolemou and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technical automation – the ability of man-made (or god-made) objects to move and act autonomously – is not just the province of engineering or science fiction. In this book, Maria Gerolemou, by taking as her starting point the close semantic and linguistic relevance of technical automation to natural automatism, demonstrates how ancient literature, performance and engineering were often concerned with the way nature and artifice interacted. Moving across epic, didactic, tragedy, comedy, philosophy and ancient science, this is a brilliant assembly of evidence for the power of 'automatic theatre' in ancient literature. Gerolemou starts with the earliest Greek literature of Homer and Hesiod, where Hephaestus' self-moving artefacts in the Iliad reflect natural forces of motion and the manufactured Pandora becomes an autonomous woman. Her second chapter looks at Greek drama, where technical automation is used to augment and undermine nature not only through staging and costume but also in plot devices where statues come to life and humans behave as automatic devices. In the third chapter, Gerolemou considers how the philosophers of the 4th century BCE and the engineers of the Hellenistic period with their mechanical devices contributed to a growing dialogue around technical automation and how it could help its audience glance and marvel at the hidden mechanisms of self-motion. Finally, the book explores the ways technical automation is employed as an ekphrastic technique in late antiquity and early Byzantium.

Author : Maria Gerolemou
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009092790
Total Pages : 347 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Body and Machine in Classical Antiquity written by Maria Gerolemou and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative and wide-ranging volume is the first systematic exploration of the multifaceted relationship between human bodies and machines in classical antiquity. It examines the conception of the body and bodily processes in mechanical terms in ancient medical writings, and looks into how artificial bodies and automata were equally configured in human terms; it also investigates how this knowledge applied to the treatment of the disabled and the diseased in the ancient world. The volume examines the pre-history of what develops, at a later stage, and more specifically during the early modern period, into the full science of iatromechanics in the context of which the human body was treated as a machine and medical treatments were devised accordingly. The volume facilitates future dialogue between scholars working on different areas, from classics, history and archaeology to history of science, philosophy and technology.

Author : Andriana Domouzi
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350260711
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Artificial Intelligence in Greek and Roman Epic written by Andriana Domouzi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first scholarly exploration of concepts and representations of Artificial Intelligence in ancient Greek and Roman epic, including their reception in later literature and culture. Contributors look at how Hesiod, Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Moschus, Ovid and Valerius Flaccus crafted the first literary concepts concerned with automata and the quest for artificial life, as well as technological intervention improving human life. Parts one and two consider, respectively, archaic Greek, and Hellenistic and Roman, epics. Contributors explore the representations of Pandora in Hesiod, and Homeric automata such as Hephaestus' wheeled tripods, the Phaeacian king Alcinous' golden and silver guard dogs, and even the Trojan Horse. Later examples cover Artificial Intelligence and automation (including Talos) in the Argonautica of Apollonius and Valerius Flaccus, and Pygmalion's ivory woman in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Part three underlines how these concepts benefit from analysis of the ekphrasis device, within which they often feature. These chapters investigate the cyborg potential of the epic hero and the literary implications of ancient technology. Moving into contemporary examples, the final chapters consider the reception of ancient literary Artificial Intelligence in contemporary film and literature, such as the Czech science-fiction epic Starvoyage, or Small Cosmic Odyssey by Jan Kr?esadlo (1995) and the British science-fiction novel The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett (2004).

Author : Maria Gerolemou
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1835536433
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Body Technologies in the Greco-Roman World written by Maria Gerolemou and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of papers that introduces the notion of the technosoma (techno body) into discussions on the representations of the body in classical antiquity. By applying the category of the technosoma to the ‘natural’ body, this volume explicitly narrows down the discussion of the technical and the natural to the physiological body. In doing so, the present collection focuses on body technologies in the specific form of beautification and body enhancement techniques, as well as medical and surgical treatments. The volume elucidates two main points. Firstly, ancient techno bodies show that the categories of gender and sexuality are at the core of the intersection of the natural and the technical, and intersect with notions of race, age, speciesism, class and education, and dis/ability. Secondly, the collection argues that new body technologies have in fact a very ancient history that can help to address the challenges of contemporary technological innovation. To this end, the volume showcases the intersection of ‘natural’ bodies with technology, gender, sexuality and reproduction. On the one hand, techno bodies tend to align with normative ideas about gender, and sexuality. On the other hand, body modification and/or enhancement techniques work hand in hand with economic and political power and knowledge, thus they often produce techno bodies that are shaped according to individual needs, i.e. according to a certain lifestyle. Consequently, techno bodies threaten to alter traditional ideas of masculinity, femininity, male and female sexuality and beauty.

Author : Colin Webster
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226828778
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tools and the Organism written by Colin Webster and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Medicine is itself a type of technology, involving therapeutic tools and substances, and so one way to write the history of medicine is as the application of different technologies to the human body. In Tools and the Organism, Colin Webster argues that, over the course of antiquity, notions shifted about what type of object a body is, what substances constitute its essential nature, and how its parts interact. By following these changes and taking the question of technology into the heart of Greek and Roman medicine, Webster reveals how the body was first conceptualized as an "organism"-a functional object whose inner parts were tools [organa] that each completed certain vital tasks. Webster's approach provides both an overarching survey of the ways that technologies impacted notions of corporeality and corporeal behaviors and, at the same time, stays attentive to the specific material details of ancient tools and how they informed assumptions about somatic structures, substances, and inner processes. For example, by turning to developments in water-delivery technologies and pneumatic tools, we see how these changing material realities altered theories of the vascular system and respiration across Classical antiquity. Tools and the Organism makes the compelling case for why telling the history of ancient Greco-Roman medical theories, from the Hippocratics to Galen, should pay close attention to the question of technology. Selling points: Tour de force survey of ancient medicine First book to demonstrate how the body got its "organs" and what this has to do with ancient technologies For anyone interested in ancient culture, science, medicine, and technology"--

Author : S. Cuomo
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521810736
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity written by S. Cuomo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-02 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses five case-studies to set ancient technical knowledge in its political, social and intellectual context.

Author : Adrienne Mayor
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691202265
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gods and Robots written by Adrienne Mayor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the story of how ancient cultures envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices and human enhancements, sharing insights into how the mythologies of the past related to and shaped ancient machine innovations.

Author : Eric Adler
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019751880X
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Battle of the Classics written by Eric Adler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition. Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education.

Author : John Peter Oleson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199734852
Total Pages : 884 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World written by John Peter Oleson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly every aspect of daily life in the Mediterranean world and Europe during the florescence of the Greek and Roman cultures is relevant to engineering and technology. This text highlights the accomplishments of the ancient societies, the research problems, and stimulates further progress in the history of ancient technology.

Author : Maria Gerolemou
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780192857552
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.5X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Technological Animation in Classical Antiquity written by Maria Gerolemou and published by . This book was released on 2024-10-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technological Animation in Classical Antiquity aims to establish the significance of technological animation within Greek and Roman societies. The chapters focus on artificial animation produced through technical procedures, exploring themes of agency, audience reception, and materiality.