Talk description: The varied theories that make up the emerging paradigm of distributed cognition assign key roles  in problem-solving to elements beyond the individual’s brain, including bodily motion, environmental scaffolds, and social networks. Situating these “distributed” approaches to thinking and problem-solving in specific historical and cultural contexts can yield new insights into practices that have traditionally been analyzed from a “brain-bound” perspective. In this talk, I will discuss how recent theories of embodied, enactive, and extended cognition can enrich our understanding of how the astronomer’s eyes, hands, and instruments informed Greco-Roman astronomical practices.

Short bio: Courtney Roby is Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University. A specialist in ancient Greek and Roman science and technology, she focuses on the literary aspects of scientific and technical texts from the ancient world, the interaction of verbal and visual elements in those texts, and cognitive-scientific approaches to ancient scientific work. She is the author of Technical Ekphrasis in Greek and Roman Science and Literature: The Written Machine between Alexandria and Rome (Cambridge University Press 2016) and The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria: Strategies of Reading from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Cambridge University Press 2023). Her new book project investigates how the cognitive science concepts of embodied, embedded, and extended mind can inform our reading of ancient scientific activity and writing.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded