Logos: Centre for the Study of Ancient Systems of Knowledge
The Centre
The LOGOS Research Centre was set up in 2001 to develop collaborative research projects into the systems of knowledge by which Greeks and Romans organised their understanding and description of the world.
Members of the Centre bring together expertise, and an impressive research track record, in the study of science and religion, of legal, mathematical, aesthetic and philosophical modes of thought, and in historiographical and hermeneutic traditions of writing. A special focus of common interest is the means by which writing and the production of texts were employed to create elaborate intellectual systems in antiquity. Alongside our philological concerns with texts of this kind, we are also committed to situating these systems of knowledge in relation to systems of power. Some of us are currently at work on projects explicitly exploring the relationships between ancient imperialisms and ancient thought. Others are engaged on research on complex philosophical and quasi-philosophical texts. The Centre is designed to foster closer collaboration between these activities, and sponsor new initiatives.
The Centre is based in the School of Classics with the participation of academic staff from Divinity, English, History and Philosophy, together with members of other Schools whose interests include the ancient world.
The Centre's activity has recently been focused on two projects in particular, outlined in more detail below. In addition, we are currently developing a number of new projects, including one of the relationship between late-Republican/Augustan and imperial Greek literature; and another on early Christian compilatory literature. A conference on 'ancient cosmologies' is planned for November 2012.
Science and Empire in the Roman World
Dr. Jason König and Prof. Greg Woolf have directed a three-year research project, generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on the relationship between scientific enterprise and imperialism during the Roman Empire. That project finished in September 2010.
A massive scientific literature survives from the Roman period. Composed in both Greek and Latin, it encompasses what are today regarded as many different genres among them works variously classified as miscellanistic, encyclopedic, biographical, philosophical, scientific, didactic, medical, technical and historical. A central preoccupation of the age was how best to order knowledge through text. Much of this writing, and the emergent intellectual disciplines and scientific practices which lay behind it, were influenced to some degree by the imperial structures through which the human and material world was governed, and the civic structures within which most scholars lived. Rhetorical education, the agonistic competition of ancient elite members, the all pervasive awareness of hierarchies and of genealogy are written deep into all these texts. Empire created libraries and enabled a new intellectual cosmopolitanism and imperial conquest brought back new information and specimens from the ends of the earth. Ancient authors were fond of comparing their works to empire in terms of their comprehensive reach and power to outdo their predecessors. Tracing the interconnections between colonialism and intellectual acquisitiveness, between imperial order and the ordering of the natural world and between social values and scientific practice has long been a preoccupation of the history of science of more recent imperial periods.
The Trust's grant made possible a series of meetings and conferences. Three project volumes are now in preparation, one on 'Encyclopaedias and Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance' (forthcoming 2013), one on 'Ancient Libraries' (forthcoming 2013), and one on 'Expertise and Authority in Roman Imperial literature and culture' (in preparation).
Project website: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/classics/science-and-empire/
Plato in the Stoa
A research project coordinated by Alex Long on Plato's legacy in Stoicism. This project explores responses to Plato in Stoic writing and thought from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. Two workshops in 2008-9 were funded by the British Academy and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies:
- Saturday 9 May 2009 - Plato’s Timaeus and its legacy
- Saturday 6 September 2008 - Plato’s legacy in Stoicism
A volume of essays is currently in preparation.
Publications
Highlight publications (published and in press)
- Gee, E. (2008) ‘Astronomy and philosophical orientation in classical and Renaissance didactic poetry, in J. Ruys (ed.) What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Brepols: 473-96.
- König, J. (2008) ‘Sympotic dialogue in the first to fifth centuries C.E.’, in Goldhill, S. (ed.) The End of Dialogue in Antiquity, Cambridge University Press: 85-113.
- König, J. (2009) ‘Conventions of prefatory self-presentation in Galen’s On the Order of My Own Books’, in Gill, C., Wilkins, J. and Whitmarsh, T. (eds) Galen and the World of Knowledge, Cambridge University Press: 35-58.
- Hine, H. (2009) ‘Subjectivity and Objectivity in Latin Scientific and Technical Literature’, in Taub, L. and Doody, A. (eds.) Authorial Voices in Greco-Roman Technical Writing: 13-30.
- König, A. (2009) ‘From architect to emperor: Vitruvius and his addressee in the De Architectura’, in Taub, L. and Doody, A. (eds.) Authorial Voices in Greco-Roman Technical Writing: 31-52.
- Woolf, G. (2011) Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West, Chichester, Malden, MA, 2011.
- Oikonomopoulou, K. and Klotz, F. (eds) (2011) The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, Oxford University Press.
- Oikonomopoulou, K. (forthcoming 2012) ‘Ethnography and Authorial Voice in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae’, in Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches, eds. Eran Almagor and Joseph Skinner, Bloomsbury Academic.
- Gee, E. (forthcoming 2013) Aratus and the Astronomical Tradition (Oxford University Press)
Major publications in preparation
- Ancient Libraries (under contract with Cambridge University Press) (jointly edited by Greg Woolf, Jason König and Katerina Oikonomopoulou)
- Encylopaedias and Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (jointly edited by Jason König and Greg Woolf)
- Authority and Expertise in Roman Imperial Culture (jointly edited by Jason König, Katerina Oikonomopoulou and Greg Woolf)
- Greek Miscellanistic Writing in the High Roman Empire (Katerina Oikonomopoulou—monograph, in preparation)
Forthcoming and recent events
- Monday 13 June: Solinus in the Twenty-First Century (a one-day workshop in the School of Classics jointly organised by Greg Woolf, Joe Howley and Felix Racine)
Contact details
Dr Jason König
Director of Logos, School of Classics, University of St Andrews, Swallowgate, Butts Wynd, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AL.
e-mail: jpk3@st-andrews.ac.uk