[SydPhil] HPS Seminar Thursday 12 November 2026 at 5:00pm

[HPS Admin]

School of History and Philosophy of Science
RESEARCH SEMINAR
[The University of Sydney]
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>From Ekphrasis to the Scientific Picture Book: The Flea, Microscopy, and Lost Skills of Description
Gideon Manning (Visiting Associate Professor, UCLA)


Date: Thursday, 12/11/2026
Start Time: 5:00pm
Venue: TBC
How to register: Free, no registration required
Website: https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/rKo8CwV1vMfPNoZMVcRHGvtJYJ6w?domain=t.e2ma.net>

Abstract: I will be presenting new work on pictorial knowledge and visuality in science.  Specifically using the example of the flea, I will argue that the flea was an object of serious study in Greco-Roman Antiquity and, in Galen’s De usu partium, came to rely on ekphrasis (vivid description of a visual encounter with a work of art). This centuries-long reliance on textual description would be challenged by early modern microscopists, who were themselves heavily invested in the communication of visual knowledge, by then including the use of illustrations.  In Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), illustrations were systematically married to text-based descriptions.  Ultimately, Hooke’s illustrations, including his illustration of the flea, served to replace the scientific object “in the world” with the scientific object “on the page.”  This transition to a scientific interest in “second nature” is still with us and represents both a loss and a gain.  Questions addressed in the talk will include: How do visual knowledge and pictorial knowledge differ from propositional knowledge?  What historical factors—technological, intellectual, and social—led to the creation of scientific picture books?  What skills and practices were lost when scientific-picture books became the standard means of communicating visual knowledge in science?

Bio: Gideon Manning is a Visiting Associate Professor at UCLA Department of Philosophy, Department of History, and Department of Comparative Literature. His research focuses on the long dialogue among medicine, science, and philosophy from Greek Antiquity to the present, with particular emphasis on changing conceptions of the human and animal body, life, death, health, explanation, and nature, as well as the rise of experimentation and mechanism as they relate to these concepts. Areas of philosophical interest include the history and philosophy of science and medicine, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy and literature, and early modern philosophy (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries).

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