Séminaire – Histoire des sciences, histoire du texte

Adaptations/summaries
Org. K. Chemla

• Julie Lefebvre
  

Book reviews, abstracts, back cover : towards a map of paratextual elements able to be substitutes of the text, the example of Philippe Descola (2021), Les Formes du visible – Une anthropologie de la figuration, Seuil, Paris./Comptes rendus, résumés, quatrième de couverture : cartographie des éléments paratextuels « tenant lieu » du texte, l’exemple de Philippe Descola (2021), Les Formes du visible – Une anthropologie de la figuration, Seuil, Paris.
Résumé :
Les comptes rendus, les résumés et la quatrième de couverture qui accompagnent la publication d’un texte relèvent du « paratexte » tel qu’identifié dans Seuils de G. Genette (Seuil, Paris, 1987). À ce titre, ils constituent une zone de médiation nécessaire entre le texte et ses lecteurs. Dans cet ensemble paratextuel, ils ont cependant un statut spécifique : ils sont en relation avec la totalité du texte dont ils ont pour fonction de donner une représentation. Parce qu’ils mettent ainsi en jeu une relation d’équivalence avec le texte auquel ils se réfèrent, ils « tiennent lieu » de celui-ci selon des modalités diverses que nous présenterons. Nous nous appuierons pour cela sur l’analyse des caractéristiques sémiolinguistiques et discursives de comptes rendus, de résumés et de la quatrième de couverture d’une publication récente en anthropologie, Les Formes du visible – Une anthropologie de la figurationde Philippe Descola (2021, éditions du Seuil, Paris).

• Clément Bonvoisin
  

Building (on) a commentary : Tsien Hsue-shen’s Engineering Cybernetics (1954) as a case study for adaptions in the history of science
Résumé :
In 1954, Tsien Hsue-shen (1911 – 2009), a Chinese-born engineer then living and working in the United States, published a monograph under the title Engineering cybernetics. The goal of the book, as stated by the author in his preface, was to make use of the then-active field of cybernetics to organise engineering practices into a science. An instance of such practices was what engineers usually called relay servomechanisms – roughly speaking, mechanisms switching between two states to regulate the behaviour of a given system. Tsien devoted a chapter of his monograph to such relay servomechanisms. In this talk, I will focus on several sections of this chapter, in which the author commented on a Ph.D dissertation that had been defended in 1952 by American mathematician Donald Bushaw (1926 – 2012). In a nutshell, as a graduate student at Princeton University, Bushaw had investigated the optimal design of certain relay servomechanisms from a mathematical viewpoint. In the course of his research, he derived some results for the optimal design of a specific family of devices – namely, second order linear relay servomechanisms. Although the dissertation had a restricted distribution list, Tsien discussed Bushaw’s results in his book, thus disclosing it to a broader audience. As it happens, as early as 1956, a Russian translation of Tsien’s monograph was edited in the Soviet Union. This translation allowed a group of Moscow-based mathematicians, gathered by Academician Lev Pontryagin (1908 – 1988) to work on related matters, to gain access to Bushaw’s achievements and to make use of it.
In my view, this situation raises a set of questions for the history of science, pertaining to the adaptation of scientific works. How has Tsien adapted Bushaw’s work to his own agenda ? In doing so, how did he transform Bushaw’s work ? In receiving an adapted version of Bushaw’s result, what were Soviet mathematicians able to do ? And, to what extent did this version impact their own work ? Such are the questions that I intend to address in this talk.

• Karine Chemla (SPHERE)
  

Diagrams as discourse
Résumé :
In this talk, I focus on diagrams used to work on equations as evidenced in Chinese sources from the eleventh century on. I examine the part played by these diagrams in the discourse, through their diagrammatic features as well as the textual mentions added to them. My aim is to show that without reading the diagrams as discourse we lose key parts of the knowledge to which the writings testify.

Lieu : Salle Rothko 412B bâtiment Condorcet