FYS: Science before Modernity

3 Credits.

Scientific understandings of the world have changed radically over time. This First-Year Seminar will explore how people from antiquity to the Middle Ages thought that the universe worked. We will look at both the theories people used to capture and model the world around them, as well as what they took to be the facts of the world they were modelling. We will explore how these (often very foreign) facts and theories interweave to create sophisticated and nuanced ways of understanding nature that are nevertheless very different from our own--and often very strange looking--and ask probing questions about what it means for people to 'know' things about the world differently than we do today. In addition to a fascinating collection of texts in translation, this seminar will also engage with the material objects of premodern science and medicine held in local museums and in Hopkins’ fantastic rare books library.