主题:炼金术的挑战——语文学、理论与实践
Topic: The Challenges of Alchemy: Philology, Theory, and Practice
主讲人:Mike A. Zuber (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland)
时间:2021年10月8日(周五)16:00–18:00
方式:Zoom会议 967 9833 3831
会议密码:714179
内容提要:
Well before the chemical revolution accomplished by Antoine Lavoisier in the late eighteenth century, what we now recognize as “chemistry” was mostly practised by alchemists. Alchemy, its literature, and practice were, and continue to be, rife with challenges, both for practitioners in history and researchers today.This lecture presents some of these challenges by following the trajectory of the alchemist’s work from textual acquisition to theory-guided interpretation and, ultimately, to experimental practice. Alchemy helps us question the divide between the sciences and the humanities, and it shows the many difficulties of experimental work in the pre-modern era. Contrary to a strong tendency in recent historiography to speak of “chymistry” and “chemistry” rather than “alchemy,” the argument holds that it makes sense to retain the term.