Berkeley Colloquia in History of Science and Technology - Fall 2009
Sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology (UC Berkeley)
Matthew L. Jones
Columbia University
"The Matter of Calculation: Early Modern Calculating Machines, Ideational Property, and Thinking about Thinking"
The history of early modern calculating machines is one of collaboration and protracted struggle between “philosophical” inventors and the skilled artisans essential for realizing the machines. These inventors--most famously Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz--were surprised and frustrated by the autonomy of their laborers, but dependent upon that autonomy. Merging labor, legal and intellectual history, this talk recounts their financial, technical, and intellectual relations with not-so-invisible artisans, before turning to the second-order legal and philosophical speculation prompted by their experiences in attempting to organize skilled labor to realize the machine. The possibility that calculating machines might serve as proxies for human reasoning prompted consideration of the boundaries of reason and corporeal skill. Pascal and Leibniz's experiences in attempting to have their machines built helped develop their accounts of the different sorts of human knowledge and skill, as well as their accounts of the place of philosophers, artisans and calculating machines within the hierarchy of beings.
4:00PM
Monday, October 5, 2009
470 Stephens Hall
UC Berkeley
Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: ohst@berkeley.edu
