Thursday, October 31, 2024
4:00 PM -
5:00 PM
Dabney Hall 110 (Treasure Room)
Literary Dimensions Seminar
What is a machine in the European Middle Ages? Cognition, mechanics, and cosmology in medieval philosophy
Jonathan Morton,
Associate Professor,
Tulane University,
Focusing particularly on texts from 12th-century Western Europe, this paper thinks through the surprising strangeness of the meanings of the Latin term machina. The aim is both to defamiliarize modern "common-sense" ideas of what a machine is or should be and to offer a window into how medieval machines (and works of art) could be conceptualized as mediating between individual humans and the cosmic universal.
Event Sponsors:
For more information, please contact Joanna Poon by phone at 626-395-1724 or by email at jpoon@caltech.edu.