Full Description
This collection brings together leading anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers to discuss the sciences and mathematics used in various Eastern, Western, and Indigenous societies, both ancient and contemporary. The authors analyze prevailing assumptions about these societies and propose more faithful, sensitive analyses of their ontological views about reality—a step toward mutual understanding and translatability across cultures and research fields.
Science in the Forest, Science in the Past is a pioneering interdisciplinary exploration that will challenge the way readers interested in sciences, mathematics, humanities, social research, computer sciences, and education think about deeply held notions of what constitutes reality, how it is apprehended, and how to investigate it.
Contents
Preface
Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd and Aparecida Vilaça
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. The Clash of Ontologies and the Problems of Translation and Mutual Intelligibility
Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd
Chapter 2. Inventing Nature: Christianity and Science in Indigenous Amazonia
Aparecida Vilaça
Chapter 3. A Clash of Ontologies? Time, Law, and Science in Papua New Guinea
Marilyn Strathern
Chapter 4. Mathematical Traditions in Ancient Greece and Rome
Serafina Cuomo
Chapter 5. Is there Mathematics in the Forest?
Mauro William Barbosa de Almeida
Chapter 6. Different Clusters of Texts from Ancient China, Different Mathematical Ontologies
Karine Chemla
Chapter 7. Shedding Light on Diverse Cultures of Mathematical Practices in South Asia: Early Sanskrit Mathematical Texts in Conversation with Modern Elementary Tamil Mathematical Curricula (in Dialogue with Senthil Babu)
Agathe Keller
Chapter 8. Antidomestication in the Amazon: Swidden and its Foes
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha
Chapter 9. Objective Functions: (In)humanity and Inequity in Artificial Intelligence
Alan Blackwell
Chapter 10. Modeling, Ontology, and Wild Thought: Toward an Anthropology of the Artificially Intelligent
Willard McCarty
Chapter 11. Rhetorical Antinomies and Radical Othering: Recent Reflections on Responses to an Old Paper Concerning Human-Animal Relations in Amazonia
Stephen Hugh-Jones
Chapter 12. Turning to Ontology in Studies of Distant Sciences
Nicholas Jardine
Chapter 13. Epilogue: The Way Ahead
Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd and Aparecida Vilaça
